A high-level malfunction in China’s internet architecture put as many as two-thirds of the country’s domain websites out of action for several hours this week, hackers and analysts said, though a report on government media blamed the outages on a large-scale cyber attack.
Many users were unaware that anything was amiss on Tuesday, when they began to get error messages trying to log on to commonly used websites, as China’s internet infrastructure often struggles to keep up with burgeoning growth and outages are a problem.
But China’s Xinhua state news agency, widely seen as a mouthpiece for the government, cited analysts warning that the outages could have been the result of a large scale cyber attack. Some traffic, according to the story, had been diverted to the website of a US company, Dynamic Internet Technology, which sells web services to Chinese users enabling them to avoid censorship. It was unclear whether the outage and the diversion of traffic were caused by hackers, or were a malfunction exploited by hackers, according to analysts quoted by Xinhua.