Great Firewall hiccup? China loses Internet connectivity for an hour
Thursday Internet traffic dropped off substantially to and from China. Paul Mozur of the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog tracked the outage as a data dropoff lasting from 11:00am to 1:00pm local time.
The interruption spawned a host of possible explanations. These included the powerful 8.6 magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Indonesia, a cinching down of the "Great Firewall of China" censorship system, a failure in the country's network backbone, and a software upgrade.
There is a bottleneck of undersea cables in the Malacca Straits which could have been affected by the quake. China is connected to the Internet from only three major points, as the Guardian notes in its coverage. This makes the country arguably more vulnerable than countries like the US. However, Xu Chuanchao, an executive with Sohu, one of China's largest Web portals, posted to his microblog his opinion that "This malfunction is caused by the failure of China's backbone network and is under renovation."
