China's Sina, Baidu and Other Big Websites Are Hit With Disruptions

A large portion of Internet traffic in China on Tuesday was redirected to servers run by a small U.S. company. The company, which publicly opposes China's efforts to control Internet content, says it wasn't at fault.

Chinese Internet users first noticed a problem at around 3:15 p.m. local time, when many complained that they couldn't access a range of popular local websites ranging from news and social media portal Sina.com to services run by search company Baidu.

One Internet security company, Qihoo 360 Technology, estimated that as much as two-thirds of traffic from the world's largest Internet market was disrupted for more than an hour.

Though the exact nature of the problem is unclear, Qihoo and another security company, Kingsoft.com, said the problem likely had to do with servers that link a website's domain name -- such as baidu.com -- with the numerical IP address that allows a computer to connect to a website.

When people in China entered website addresses into their browsers Tuesday, many were sent to a single IP address, identified by Internet security companies as belonging to Dynamic Internet Technology. The company provides services to help people view content blocked by the Great Firewall -- the system of filters and blocks that prevents Internet users in China from accessing a range of websites like Facebook and Twitter.

Bill Xia, who created Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001, said his company had nothing to do with the massive shift in traffic. Most likely, he said, the shift occurred as the result of a tweak to the Great Firewall by the Chinese government, which inadvertently sent a huge amount of traffic to his IP address. Normally, he said, that address is blocked in China.

"It was hundreds of thousands of users per second. They were sending [all of] China to us, so it's hundreds of millions of users," he said in a phone interview. "It's still ongoing. We didn't see it die out. Maybe they fixed it for some part of China ... but it's still really heavy traffic."

Xia likened the mishap with something similar that happened in 2002. At that time, he said, Chinese users searching for the news portal Sina.com were for a short time accidentally sent to a blocked site associated with Falun Gong.

Xia, who is originally from China, declined to give his age or the exact location of his company, citing his concerns about the Chinese government tracking his activities. He said his company offers Chinese users its Freegate service, which helps them view news and social media blocked in China.

A practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China in the late 1990s, Xia attended school in the U.S. in the 1990s and has mostly stayed in the country since to operate the business, which he says gets a helping hand from volunteers from large U.S. Internet companies. "We want to help people to access free information and it's very important for people to get free information right now in China," he said.

At around 4:30 p.m. local time, DNSPod, a company that provides DNS services in China, said that the servers had been fixed but that problems could continue for another 12 hours.

Baidu said on its official Weibo account at 4:40 p.m. that its engineers were "communicating urgently with providers" and gave addresses for servers that remained functional.

The China Internet Network Information Center didn't answer phone calls inquiring about the problem.

Earlier, an official with the China Internet Network Information Center told the Beijing News that it was too early to tell whether it might be related to an outside attack. "To be sure there have been malicious attacks on the Domain Network System in the past, but right now under the current circumstances, we can't say," he had said.