- China web traffic was blocked to access outsider -Webot
- No political or sensitive events appear to have fallen
- Pakistan also suffered an operating time before
China seems to have shut up from the internet world for over an hour earlier this week, but could it just have been a mistake?
The country’s “Great Firewall” disturbed all traffic on TCP port 443 used for https, for 74 minutes on August 20, 2025, but with most citizens asleep during the power break (00: 34-01: 48 Beijing time), was this intended behavior?
Interestingly, only port 443 was affected, leaving other gates such as 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP and 8443 (alterative HTTPS) unaffected.
China just had a partial Internet interruption
By injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packages to cut compounds on port 443, the large firewall blocked access to most sites outside China and also disturbed services that depend on offshore servers, including Apple and Tesla.
A report explained that the large firewall in China is not a single device, but a “complex system composed of different network devices that perform censorship.” The device involved did not match fingerprints of known GFW equipment, suggesting that the 74-minute power outage could have come from a new censorship, an incorrectly configured known gap or a test of the port blocking ability.
The big firewall also has a story with errors, leaks and other technical errors.
Unlike previous censorship events, no major political or other sensitive events were identified during this power outage, which made the cause more hidden.
Coincidentally, Pakistan also saw a large decrease in internet traffic times before the Chinese power outage. The two countries both have similar stories of web censorship, and China has even been linked to sharing censorship technology with Pakistan, which potentially draws a connection between the two events.
More broadly, the granular and more complex censorship that China chooses (compared to total shutdowns observed in Turkey, Sudan and Egypt) a fine balance between limiting access to foreign information while avoiding financial damage.
When society responded to the report’s comments with suspicions that this could have been a test, we are back with a little more evidence than believing that either this is the case or it was a mistake.
