Telekom Malaysia Berhad ™ wishes to announce that there has been a disruption of its Internet services due to circuit faults on the Asian American Gateway (AAG) submarine cable network at Lantau in China and at the domestic international link at Genting Sempah, Pahang, linking Malaysia to the United States (US) and Hong Kong.

Due to this, customers using Internet services may now experience slow browsing while accessing content hosted in the U.S. and Hong Kong. In addition, customers using other IP services such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) and other critical business applications linked to the U.S. and Hong Kong may also experience some service degradation.

To alleviate the problem, some of the links have been rerouted to alternate routes to ease the congestion.

During the restoration process, traffic to Northern America and Hong Kong may experience minor degradation while traffic to other countries is not affected. TM will make further announcements on the progress of the restoration works.

TM wishes to assure its customers that it is undertaking all necessary measures to restore communications services for its customers as soon as possible.

Customers can call TM at 100 and select “Internet Services” or e-mail us at help@tm.com.my for any Internet related problems.

Just a few weeks another cable fault again?  I think the whale is on their mating seasons

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) wishes to announce that its consortium members have detected a cable fault on the South East Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 4 (SMW4) cable network along the Colombo – Mumbai segment that links Malaysia to Europe. The consortium will be carrying out repair works on site on Sunday, 23 May 2010.

During the restoration process, there may be some interruption to the traffic to Europe carried through that cable. TM has taken pro-active steps to minimize disruptions by providing adequate links on other routes and coordinated with other international carriers in order to provide additional bandwidth for our customers. In order to further alleviate the situation, TM will also be diverting traffic to other networks to reduce congestion, thus, minimizing the impact to our users.

However, despite these initiatives, customers using Internet services nationwide may experience some degree of service degradation such as slow browsing while accessing international websites. Nevertheless, customers using Virtual Private Network (VPN) and other critical business applications linked to Europe will be assured minimal degradation of service, if any.

TM will provide necessary updates on the progress of the restoration works.

We apologize for any inconveniences caused by this disruption, whilst at the same time, would like to assure our customers that TM is undertaking all necessary measures to ensure that customers experience minimal service interruption.

TM wishes to thank its customers for their understanding and patience during the affected period. Meanwhile, customers can call TM at 100 and select “Technical Assistance” or email help@tm.com.my for any Internet related problems.?

Here is the recent update for the cable fault. During this outage youtube.com speed has been improving at full speed. Not sure this is just temporarily or permanently. The speed for ftp is improving but no 100% at full speed. Hopefully TM.Net Network Operation Centre realized they still need to tune up the routing because a lot of people still complaining of their slow speed.

Kindly reply here for feedback regarding your speed.

Hi everyone i already detected the issues for the past 3 weeks and TM ignore my complaint and yesterday they put this announcement and even my complaint to their NOC ignored. Hope the routing come back again and they fix it

Thousands of Internet users found themselves cut off for about an hour when TM’s Streamyx service was interrupted by what looks to be a nationwide service failure.

Irate Malaysians have taken to Twitter as well as popular tech forum Lowyat.net to declare unanimously: “Streamyx sucks!”

Gareth Davies, IT security consultant and popular blogger, made the effort to ‘ping’ the main TM server and his findings showed service failures across the board. Connections to Penang, Johor, and most of the Klang Valley were down, according to his findings.

“I’d like to know what happened, ” Davies (right) said. “It seems like the whole network just dropped.”

Davies, himself a long-time Streamyx user says this is the first such experience he’s seen.

“I’ve seen area blackouts but never anything on this scale.”

Twitter fury

Malaysians with access to alternate Internet connections, such as mobile 3G were quick to voice their displeasure at TM.

On Twitter, Streamyx customers labeled their tweets with the Twitter tag #streamyxsucks.

Besides voicing their frustration, users shared tips and experiences. One user reported being able to connect to the Internet by switching to Google’s DNS servers instead of TM’s.

On popular tech forum lowyat.net, users from all over Malaysia from Sabah and Sarawak to Johor and Penang reported their service issues in a thread. Some anecdotes proved fairly entertaining such as this one from the user jamince:

“Streamyx in my office – Kelana Jaya is down too. My admin called Streamyx to ask if our account had been suspended. They checked for a long time, then they answered: “Sorry, I’m not able to check because our office Internet is down too.”

Efforts to contact TM for clarification have proven futile as its support line was unreachable.

One Malaysian Twitter user, bongkerz claimed to have gotten through to TM’s customer service, who confirmed the outage but gave no reason to its cause.