Major Internet Outage in China

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2 pointsjchung1 comment

At that very moment the Internet in China went down - with a few exceptions (VPN users and those who had the DNS cached within their client).

Hmm... perhaps I should stop using DNS to resolve the IP addresses of my VPN servers. I thought I would be safe because I use Google's DNS servers but, according to greatfire.org[0]:

However, during that time, we see that a lookup to 8.8.8.8, a public DNS operated by Google, returned bogus results if the lookup was done from China. In fact, the Google public DNS was not poisoned; the bogus response 65.49.2.178 could only have been returned by GFW. If the Chinese root DNS server was hacked, a DNS lookup in China via 8.8.8.8 should have returned a correct response.

I live in China but am away at present, so wasn't affected. Phew.

[0] https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/internet-outage-china...

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