Japan's earthquake didn't even slow BitTorrent use

Well, this is interesting, but it also makes perfect sense to me. After the first quake hit, the cell phones were down, the lusernet was down (SMS and cell providers' proprietary mail systems, I mean), and even landlines were down (overloaded by frantic callers). But the Internet was utterly unperturbed.

We tend to have synchronous 100Mbps or 1Gbps fiber here, even at home. I was not able to call anybody on the office phones, nor on my iPhone, but in the minute after the quake I was quickly able to Skype and Facetime to various people. I was actually viewing my home office with EvoCam (though nobody happened to be there at the time) when the second big quake struck. Watching stuff fall off the shelves remotely.

AFAICT, places that didn't lose electric power didn't lose Internet either, and since torrents don't tend to be manual things and the Internet infrastructure here can easily handle millions of people jumping on the web to see what is going on (though that can't be said of www.tepco.co.jp, which did go down), everything just kept plugging along.