Chinese Web Outage Blamed on Censorship Glitch; New York Times, 1/22/14

Amy Qin, New York Times; Chinese Web Outage Blamed on Censorship Glitch:

"Chinese authorities on Wednesday suggested that a major disruption of the Internet in China this week was the work of hackers. But others blamed the massive outage on a malfunction of the government’s own Great Firewall, the sprawling, hidden infrastructure used to restrict what ordinary Chinese can see online.

Millions of Internet users in China attempting to access a range of websites on Tuesday afternoon were rerouted to servers run by a small American firm dedicated to fighting web censorship. For more than an hour, Chinese users reported being unable to access websites ending in .com, .net, and .org, including the popular search engine Baidu and microblogging platform Sina Weibo. The problem is said to have affected as much as two-thirds of Internet traffic in China."