China Hit by the Largest DDOS Attack the Country Has Ever Seen

Part of the Chinese Internet went down early Sunday morning in what the government is calling the largest denial-of-service attack it has ever faced.

The attack began at 2 a.m. Sunday morning and was followed by a more intense attack at 4 a.m., according to the China Internet Network Information Center, which apologized to affected users in its statement and said it is working to improve its “service capabilities.”

The attack, which was aimed at the registry that allows users to access sites with the extension “.cn,” likely shut down the registry for about two to four hours, according to CloudFlare, a company that provides Web performance and security services for more than a million websites. Though the registry was down, many service providers store a record of parts of the registry for a set period of time, meaning that the outage only affected a portion of websites for some users.