China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday
Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark
China cut itself off from much of the global internet for just over an hour on Wednesday.
Activist group Great Firewall Report spotted the outage, which it said disrupted all traffic to TCP port 443 – the standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.
“Between approximately 00:34 and 01:48 (Beijing Time, UTC+8) on August 20, 2025, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) exhibited anomalous behavior by unconditionally injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to disrupt all connections on TCP port 443,” the group wrote in a Wednesday post.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/china_port_443_block_outage/Open linkView original on lemmy.world152
Comments16
“This has been a test…”
Of the Orwell Plagiarism System...
just an hour in the middle of the night? sounds more like maintenance or an accidental block.
Or a test run to check reactions
Are we supposed to be glad they have the ability to do this?
Sharks in the ocean also have this ability.
No mention of port 80 (HTTP) in the article... I wonder if they still had access to the internet, just without SSL?
Don’t a lot of websites enforce https at this point?
nah mate, SSL is a fad. it'll be turned off any day now.
I think AI has already moved on from that fad; every website I've vibe coded this week has only worked on http so far. You can check this one out if you want: http://localhost:3000/
Hey! You've copied that app that I've been working on, you dirty thief. Not even bothered to make any changes, either. Switch that off at once!
Also isn't there plenty of ways of using the internet that don't use either HTTP or HTTPS?
I doubt this is going to affect the propaganda machines’ Internet connection
Did .ml get real quiet?
.ml is blocked in China not surprisingly.
We were chillin rent free in y'all's heads