China suffers major Internet outage, hackers suspected

Shanghai: A major Internet outage in China on Tuesday that rerouted users to the US website of a company which helps people get around Beijing's censorship may have been due to a hacking attack, the official Xinhua news service reported.The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said in a microblog post that the outage, which lasted for several hours, was due to a malfunction in China's top-level domain name root servers on Tuesday afternoon.Chinese Internet users were rerouted to a US-based website run by Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that sells anti-censorship web services tailored for Chinese users, including a product that enables the retrieval of microblog posts deleted by Chinese censors.Dynamic Internet Technology did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The company website lists the Epoch Times, a publication produced by the Falun Gong religious sect which is banned in China, as a client. Other clients include Voice of America and Human Rights in China.Reuters