Clouds and submarine cables report no impact from sixth-largest earthquake in recorded history, subsequent tsunami
- Reference: 1753850857
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/30/russia_earthquake_comms_cloud_impact/
- Source link:
According to the US Geological Service, the magnitude 8.8 quake [1]struck on July 30 at 09:24:50 local time (UTC+10:00). The Service’s [2]list of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded lists only five more powerful seismic events. Russia’s Geophysical Survey also [3]reported 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 [4]National Weather Service suggested the entire US West Coast should be on alert.
[5]
Closer to the quake, in Japan, authorities [6]ordered residents in low-lying coastal areas to immediately evacuate to higher ground or a safe location.
[7]
[8]
The Register has seen [9]reports of 30cm tsunami waves in Japan.
But we’ve seen no reports of outages at communication or cloud computing facilities, or at chipmaking plants.
[10]January earthquake shook $165M off TSMC’s revenue forecast
[11]TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan
[12]Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild
[13]Japanese earthquake disrupts chip industry operations
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.
[14]
Readers may also recall that a [15]2011 tsunami caused immense damage at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, whose operator on Wednesday [16]advised 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. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=21.37124,75.67383&extent=76.5373,244.59961
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/20-largest-earthquakes-world-1900
[3] http://www.gsras.ru/cgi-bin/new/mapCustom.pl?x=422&y=273#=20&rad=500
[4] https://www.tsunami.gov/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aIntPD2DAIN3NivBxHLO9wAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/press/2507/30a/202507301010.html
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIntPD2DAIN3NivBxHLO9wAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aIntPD2DAIN3NivBxHLO9wAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c987dwrdl0zo
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/tsmc_taiwan_earthquake_financial_impact/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/21/taiwan_earthquake_tsmc/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/24/on_call/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/03/japanese_earthquake_disrupts_chip_industry/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIntPD2DAIN3NivBxHLO9wAAAJc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/11/japanese_nuclear_emergency/
[16] https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/hd/index-e.html
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: the National Weather Service suggested the entire US East Coast should be on alert.
Yes, that should be West coast of the US!
The US in general seem to have a problem with geography. Our HR team on the US West coast invited everyone to a compulsory meeting at a time to suit them, ignoring the fact that it was midnight Central European Time. I had to quote European "right to disconnect" legislation, before they would back down and hold separate meetings for EMEA and APAC!
Re: the National Weather Service suggested the entire US East Coast should be on alert.
To be fair, I did see a report out of Washington DC that said East Coast residents should keep aware, just in case. Trump's people aren't exactly known for their general intelligence, though ...
For the record, I'm up here in Fort Bragg at the moment. Down in the Noyo Harbor[0] on my boat, to be exact. We had an abnormal flow up-river starting around 00:30 hours, which continued for about half an hour raising the water about 14 to 16 inches. Then it started draining out again ~40 minutes later. And again started rising, until it was back where it was, and now it's falling again. Here's a link to a Noyo Harbor-cam. It's kinda dark, but but you can see bits flowing in the water, right to left is up-river, left to right is back out to sea. There is a ladder across the way that you can use to gauge the level of the water, the steps are about 16 inches apart. Note that the next actual high tide here is at about 3:30AM Pacific time, call it two hours from now.
https://www.noyocenter.org/live-harbor-cam
Somehow I suspect that the Pacific Coast has avoided being washed into the ocean once again.
Edit: It has flipped, and the river is back-flowing again as I post :-)
[0] It's a place-name, thus I left out my usual (u).
the National Weather Service suggested the entire US East Coast should be on alert.
Surely that's either the "left coast of the USA", or "the far eastern shore of the Bering Sea (or the Sea of Okhotsk?)".