Yesterday I was looking to download something from Baidu Cloud and found my browser timing out. I found it strange that such a large site as China's largest search engine would be unreachable. I did pings resulting in 100% packet loss. I also did an NMap which said there was no server connected. I checked with
this web site [uptrends.com] to see Baidu.cn's availability, but did not know of the tool's reliability. The Tool said that Baidu was available for North America but not Europe. This happened for about 20 minutes, after which everything suddenly reappeared.
Today I am reading this
NYT article [nytimes.com] discussing China flexing its censorship muscles.
One Beijing online video company watched as its app and website went offline for about 20 minutes without warning. The way it was disconnected — the digital tether that connected its service to the rest of the internet was severed — suggested more than a mere technical outage, according to the leader of the firm’s technology team, who requested anonymity for himself and the company for fear of reprisals.
Upon reflection I suppose no Chinese web site is beyond censorship. It would be unthinkable for the US Government to take down Google. Or was my outage just a technical anomaly?
