We've been hit! We've been hit!

In case you were wondering, ZDNet Asia wasn't on holiday yesterday.

We were among the companies affected by the damage to undersea cables as a result of an earthquake that hit off the southern coast of Taiwan on Tuesday night.

Killing two persons, the quake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale damaged a major underwater communications link called the Asia Pacific cable network 2 submarine cable (APCN2). This in turn affected many telecommunications companies across Asia, including Chunghwa Telecom and SingTel.

Desperate times have indeed called for desperate measures. Unable to access the Internet and our e-mail system yesterday, my colleague even resorted to faxing questions to network operators. And as we realized we couldn't access the network to publish our stories, we made contact with our counterparts in ZDNet's UK office and they provided an avenue to utilize the quotes we had "painstakingly" acquired.

When it became apparent that the damage was more severe than just a day or two of disruption, we decided there was no way we could work offline in the office any longer. We packed our bags and headed to a colleague's home, where the service provider had managed to regain its Net access services.

So, this blog posting is really a testimony of the benefit in empowering your workforce to go mobile...but then that's another story altogether.

Even as we struggle to keep up to speed with the latest on the cable crisis, we'd like to hear your thoughts on the situation and, if your company was affected, how you have coped with the disruption.

Stay tuned to ZDNet Asia for updates and follow-up stories on the aftermath of the Boxing Day cable damage.