Wilfred Kwan Tai-lai, president and chief technology officer at undersea cable operator Asia Netcom, looked forward to a pleasant dinner at a fine restaurant on Boxing Day.
Andrew Kwok Wing-pong, vice-president of international business for Hutchison Global Communications (HGC), was keen to take some rest after a seven-hour road trip from Manila to spend his holiday at the mountain resort community of Baguio in the northern Philippines.
The two executives were soon to be involved in a regional hi-tech disaster that quickly had global implications, spending the rest of their holidays scrambling to help prevent a modern-day telecommunications breakdown of unprecedented scale as business and financial firms in Hong Kong and the region faced crippling internet hold-ups.
At about 8.30pm on December 26, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale occurred off the southern coast of Taiwan. The quake and the strong aftershocks knocked out power, damaged buildings and caused a few casualties and dozens of injuries in southern Taiwan.
The tremors were felt across Taiwan and in the Pearl River Delta region, including Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and Fujan .
Mother nature's rumble - reportedly the strongest earthquake in 100 years to hit the Luzon Strait which links the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea - also damaged six regional submarine cable systems and disrupted telecommunications services across Asia.
Mr Kwan managed to finish his dinner that evening, but only after making several phone calls to the operations team of Asia Netcom, which runs the 19,800km East Asia Crossing (EAC) fibre-optic undersea cable system that links Hong Kong, the mainland, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Singapore.