- Access to domain names such as .com blocked Tuesday afternoon in China
- State media quoted security experts saying this could have been cyber attack
- Internet users rerouted to U.S.-owned website with links to banned group in China
- Dynamic Internet Technology said problem likely caused by China’s own censors
Hong Kong (CNN) — Millions of Chinese netizens were prevented from accessing huge swathes of the Internet Tuesday, with many rerouted to a website owned by a U.S. company with ties to a group outlawed in China.
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a state-run department, blamed a “malfunction in root servers” that blocked access to top-level domain names in China such as .com and .net, according to a post on its Sina Weibo account, the Twitter-like micro-blogging service.
Security analysts quoted by the official Xinhua news agency said this could have been the result of a cyber attack by hackers — though this has not been proved.
Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) confirmed it owns the web address users were redirected to but denied any involvement. It said the company’s IP address is already blocked in China so users would have been met by a blank web page.
DIT President Bill Xia told CNN Wednesday that the Internet outage was likely caused by China’s own web censorship system, more widely known by its infamous “Great Firewall” moniker, which controls access to content on the Internet inside China deemed unsuitable.
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