- Web traffic in China has been prevented from access to Outsider websites
- No political or sensitive event seems to have coincided
- Pakistan has also undergone a breakdown of hours before
China seems to have stopped from the Internet world for more than an hour earlier this week, but could it have been a mistake?
The country’s “Great Firewall” disturbed all traffic on the TCP 443 port, used for HTTPS, for 74 minutes on August 20, 2025, but with most of the sleeping citizens during the breakdown (00: 34-01: 48 Beijing), was this behavior planned?
Interestingly, only port 443 was affected, leaving other ports like 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP and 8443 (alternative HTTPS).
China has just passed a partial internet breakdown
By injecting the TCP + ACK packs forged to cut connections on Port 443, the large firewall blocked access to most websites outside of China and also disturbed services based on offshore servers, including Apple and Tesla.
A report explained that the great firewall in China is not a single entity, but a “complex system made up of various network devices that are censorship”. The device involved did not correspond to the fingerprints of the known GFW equipment, suggesting that the 74 -minute failure could have come from a new censorship device, a fracture knownly known or a test of blocking capacity of the ports.
The large firewall also has a history of seeds, leaks and other technical errors.
Unlike previous censorship events, no political or other sensitive event has been identified during this failure, which makes reason more obscured.
By coincidence, Pakistan has also seen a sharp drop in internet traffic of hours before the Chinese failure. The two countries both have similar history of censorship on the web, and China has even been linked to the sharing of censorship technology in Pakistan, potentially arousing a link between the two events.
More broadly, granular censorship and more complex than China chooses (compared to the total closures observed in Turkey, Sudan and Egypt) strikes a fine balancing act between restricting access to foreign information while avoiding economic damage.
The community responding to the comments of the relationship with suspicions that it could have been a test, we find ourselves with little more evidence than to believe that this is the case, that is, it was a mistake.
