China suffered a massive Internet outage yesterday that authorities say was the result of an error in the nation's top level domain name root servers (DNS). According to reports the error rendered unreachable half of the country's websites ending in .com for an hour.
During the outage, instead of being able to access their own websites, owners were directed to an IP address located in Cary, North Carolina and registered to a company called Dynamic Internet Technology. According to foreign media sources, Dynamic Internet Technology provides anti-censorship products that are geared towards Chinese customers seeking to circumvent the nation's strict Internet surveillance and censorship technologies. The redirected traffic was so large that the company had to shut down the site for some users.
While no specific cause of the outage has been announced, neither a cyber-attack nor a hacker orchestrated domain hijacking has been ruled out. DNS is considered one of the weakest links in the Internet and is highly susceptible to attacks. Others, however, say that the outage may have been caused by a domestic network operator which is quite common but generally not to the scale of yesterday's outage. The outage did not affect users' mobile Internet access and some users who had access to virtual private networks (VPN) reported that they did not run into any problems with access.
Sources say that as of yesterday evening the error has been resolved and all regular access had been restored in most urban areas, but there have been reports of residual outages in China's more rural areas.