The Great Firewall of China has a pretty big crack

State censors apparently accidentally shut down the internet for most of China on Tuesday. That's only the half the story.

great firewall
(Image credit: (ThinkStock))

On Tuesday, a pretty mysterious thing happened on the internet. The short version certainly grabs your attention: At about 3:15 p.m., China time (yes, China has only one time zone), the firehose of almost all China's internet traffic poured into a small company in Cheyenne, Wyo., crashing its servers in less than a millisecond and shutting down the internet for most of China's 500 million users for about eight hours.

"I have never seen a bigger outage," Heiko Specht, an internet analyst at Compuware, tells The New York Times. "Half of the world's internet users trying to access the internet couldn't."

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.