Keynote: Internet Held Up Well After Japan Quake

Web monitoring firm Keynote Systems says Internet access in Japan remained good in the hours following Friday's earthquake and tsunami. Keynote says it closely monitored the performance of the Internet from Japan late Friday afternoon and found few major problems, although some leading Japanese sites struggled to stay up and available.

"At a macro level, the Internet did what it’s supposed to do. It didn’t even blink," said Dave Karow, senior product manager for Internet test and monitoring at Keynote. "Access from Tokyo to major internet properties based on the Keynote Business 40 was not impacted in any meaningful way. Additionally, access between Tokyo and regional hubs including Seoul, Singapore and Taipai, as well as San Francisco, was not impacted either."

While Internet access was good, performance was spottier across many major Japanese web properties, who dealt with heavy load at a moment when much of the nation's infrastructure was stressed. "On the micro scale we examined a number of popular Japanese-hosted sites, looking for performance alarms tripped during the day," said Karow. "What we found was that most alarms were for slow-downs rather than site failures and most were short lived - less than an hour. Interestingly, these performance alarms were spread out throughout the day rather than clustering around the time of the earthquake. A small number of alarms were for complete outages. These site outages tended to be longer, averaging 7.5 hours.”