In what has been described at the biggest Internet outage ever, 500-million Chinese users were unable to load sites for about eight hours on Tuesday.
It is now believed that the culprit was China’s own security system – dubbed the Great Firewall – that was to blame, redirecting traffic to site outside of the country.
Many of the sites are more usually blocked by the firewall.
Apparently, according to the China Internet Information Centre, the problem originated in the country’s domain name system and affected about three quarters of the country’s domain name servers.