11 p.m. Taipei time (11 a.m. EDT) on Tuesday, the international division of Taiwan's dominant telecommunciation carrier, Chunghwa Telecom International Business Group, or CHTI, was handling 50,000 calls to the U.S. every five minutes, with a successful connection rate of less than 10 percent for all attempted calls, said Cheng Luh, VP of CHTI. By 3 a.m. local time Wednesday, the company had seen its completion rate rise to around 30 percent while the volume of calls remained high, he said.
However, connection problems persisted through Wednesday morning, Taipei time.
"We have enough (international telephone) circuits but it's very difficult to get connected to the local network in the U.S.," Cheng said. The problem was most severe for calls between Taiwan and New York, where the local telecommunication infrastructure has been overloaded by calls, he said.
Web hosting company Exodus Communications in Santa Clara, Calif., and AOL, the world's largest ISP based in Dulles, Va., near Washington, D.C., both reported that operations were not affected although Net traffic surged.
"We have increased security at all of our data centers worldwide and are continuing to monitor the situation," said Melissa Neumann, a public relations manager at Exodus. The company has 44 data centers globally. She did not have information about extra assistance that might have been offered to large media sites that are Exodus customers.
However, a broadband POP, or point of presence, for national ISP Earthlink, one of two in New York City, had lost connectivity, the company said Tuesday afternoon. Some of the ISP's dialup POPs in New York also were down, said Steve Dougherty, director of systems vendor management.
Perhaps the most affected news Web site was CNN.com, the online presence of the Cable News Network, which is part of the AOL Time Warner media empire. By shortly after 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday, those looking for news could reach the site only sporadically. The company responded by stripping graphics and links from the home page and boosting bandwidth. By late afternoon, the site was fully accessible, as were the Web sites of other major media outlets, including those of The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which provided frequent updates.
The spike in Internet use was, in fact, "relatively short-lived," according to Matrix.Net, which measures Internet performance. IP, or Internet Protocol, traffic returned to "near-normal performance levels within about an hour" after the spike in traffic shortly after the attacks occurred, said the Austin, Texas-based company. The Internet, "appears to have survived a severe test of the adaptable traffic routing concepts it embodies," the company said.
However, as the hours went by and a calmer sense began to prevail, the long-range ramifications for IT started to take focus.
"The face of America changes as of today. The face of IT is going to change," said Winn Schwartau, president of Interpact and an author on computer security. "A lot of people like to separate the physical and the virtual, they're not (separate)."
Of course, businesses that had offices in the World Trade Center have been immediately affected. After the 1993 terrorist bombing there, 26 percent of the companies went out of business because they had not properly backed up the records needed to reconstruct their businesses, Schwartau said, citing U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation data.
U.S. lawmakers might well call for heightened Web surveillance measures, using technologies such as Carnivore and Echelon, the global telecommunication spy network that U.S. officials have long denied exists. One common refrain throughout the day was the question of how government security officials could not have known that such an extreme attack was being planned and why it was not stopped.
Asked about the likelihood that Tuesday's terrorism will usher in an era of spying technologies, Schwartau said, "there's going to be a lot of extreme things said."
