Liu Yu has felt like a "fish out of water" for the past few days.

This 26-year-old clerk from Beijing is just one of millions of netizens coping with life without access to the MSN instant messaging service since the severing of undersea cables as a result of two earthquakes that rocked Taiwan on Tuesday.

"The breakdown of the MSN service since Tuesday has brought a sudden end to my familiar cyber world, making my life dull and boring," said Liu.

An online survey by Sina.com, the country's leading news portal, found that at least half of the country's 15 million MSN users have been affected by the current breakdown and have tried new ways of online communication.

The syndrome has been so widespread that a blog essay competition on the theme of "days without MSN" held by sohu.com, a leading popular website in China, attracted hundreds of netizens within a few hours on Friday.

"Days without MSN are simply so unbearable," wrote the majority of netizens, many of whom asked online for ideas to kill time.

They also said that a symptom of the syndrome is that they click every 10 minutes to check whether the MSN service has been restored and cannot concentrate on their work.

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