An unrecorded quake off Mindanao on Wednesday may have caused an undersea  Asia Pacific cable network to break which led Internet traffic to crawl in the region, a report has claimed.

Research firm Ovum, in a short media note, said the US Geological Survey (USGS) logged a magnitude 5.6 earthquake around Mindanao at 4am Thursday.

The report said that it is possible that a similar quake occurred a day earlier – but went unrecorded – which triggered the reported outages.

As of this writing, news reports are saying that Internet traffic in a number of Asia countries, particularly the Philippines and Singapore, are still experiencing slow Internet connection.

Initially reports have put the blame on Typhoon Morakot (local name: Kiko), which battered Taiwan and China in recent days as the culprit in the rupture of the APCN2 (Asia Pacific Cable Network 2).

Ovum said that since multiple cables have been affected, the most likely cause is undersea seismic activity. Cable damage due to fishing activity, it said, tends to be in shallow water and usually affects one cable at a time.

The disruptions were puzzling, the report said, since the only earthquakes logged by USGS in Asia were located far from the reported breaks. Thus, it is likely that the USGS log simply missed one or more underwater earthquakes responsible for the breaks, it said.

Another possibility, the report added, is that the outages actually stemmed from terrestrial hardware or fiber network failures. “These are less common but not unheard of,” said Ovum. “Deliberate sabotage of either the undersea cables or the cable terminating stations on shore is another explanation.”

The report said cable stations are not always well secured and it is impossible to safeguard thousands of kilometers of cable deep underwater.

“Hopefully, these issues will resolve themselves over the next few days. Given that there is no single authority managing or monitoring the world’s undersea cable networks, uncertainty is inevitable, and it takes time to learn the hard facts,” it said.

The report concluded: “With progress comes higher expectations, though, so we look forward to learning from this recent outage how to improve performance going forward; after all, undersea cable networks play central, underappreciated roles in global commerce.”