China's Great Firewall blamed for eight-hour Internet blackout

A large portion of Internet traffic in China on Tuesday was redirected to servers run by a small U.S. company. The company, which publicly opposes China's efforts to control Internet content, says it wasn't at fault.

Online users in the country were unable to access any website hosted on the mainland or overseas with top-level domains such as ".com", ".net", and ".org", according to a South China Morning Post (SCMP) report, which cited incidents reported by several major ISPs (internet service providers). Web addresses ending in the ".cn" country code were unaffected.

China's internet officials said the problem was misconfigured domain name servers outside of China, which translate domain names like "Baidu.com" into numeric IP addresses. But Reuters cited unnamed sources familiar with China's web management operations who said the malfunction may have been an "engineering mistake" that Chinese government employees made while making changes to the country's "Great Firewall" internet censorship system.

During a daily news briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said he did not know who was responsible.

"I don't know who did this or where it came from, but what I want to point out is this reminds us once again that maintaining internet security needs strengthened international cooperation. This again shows that China is a victim of hacking."

Read the full Reuters story -here-

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