Network and security experts are still trying to nail down the cause of an outage on Tuesday that briefly redirected huge amounts of China's Internet traffic to US destinations.
The incident left a large portion of China's 500 million Internet users unable to visit websites ending in .com, .net, and .org. Requests for addresses ending in those top-level domains were instead sent to IP addresses operated by US-based Dynamic Internet Technology or, according to The New York Times, a 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Local officials in China said the incident was the result of a malfunction in the country's domain name system. They called on authorities to do more to protect China's DNS servers. US-based security researchers, however, said a DNS outage or hack was most likely not the cause. A public DNS server operated by Google returned the same faulty IP addresses generated by China's official servers, these researchers said. They pointed out that Dynamic Internet Technology operates services designed to circumvent China's censorship regime, which is often referred to as the Great Firewall of China (GFW).
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