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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

A vastly powerful earthquake that radiated out from the eastern Russian coast on Wednesday has caused a significant tsunami but hasn’t disrupted communications or cloud computing services.

According to the US Geological Service, the magnitude 8.8 quake struck [usgs.gov] on July 30 at 09:24:50 local time (UTC+10:00). The Service’s list [usgs.gov] of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded lists only five more powerful seismic events. Russia’s Geophysical Survey also reported [gsras.ru] the quake, and appears to have rated it magnitude 8.9.

Governments around the Pacific Ocean issued warnings that tsunamis could follow the earthquake – even in the far-off USA where the National Weather Service [tsunami.gov] suggested the entire US West Coast should be on alert.

Closer to the quake, in Japan, authorities ordered [jma.go.jp] residents in low-lying coastal areas to immediately evacuate to higher ground or a safe location.

But we’ve seen no reports of outages at communication or cloud computing facilities, or at chipmaking plants.

One submarine cable – the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – Anadyr link operated by Russia’s Rostelecom – passes very close to the site of the quake, but at the time of writing the carrier has not posted any information about an outage.

We’ve also consulted status pages for the three major clouds – AWS, Azure, and Google – and none report disruptions at their Japanese operations or elsewhere.

Readers may also recall that a 2011 tsunami [theregister.com] caused immense damage at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, whose operator on Wednesday advised [tepco.co.jp] that it had evacuated all staff and suspended discharge of treated water left over from the 2011 incident.

Many submarine cables lie south of the quake’s epicenter, so their operations could suffer as the tsunami rumbles across the Pacific Ocean. The Register will update this story if we learn of any outages. ®

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