All,
I know that access to Chinese websites from outside China is notorious for
being slow or broken, but we seem to have had a major increase in support
calls from our users over the last couple of weeks, complaining of slow or
no access to major Chinese websites, such as www.baidu.com, www.youku.com and
world.taobao.com.
We can't find anything on our network that would be affecting this, and at
various times can (and cannot!) reproduce it with off-net connections, which
would indicate that it's an intermittent, but widespread issue.
Is anyone else seeing an increase in problems related to Chinese websites?
Thanks in advance,
Simon
Hi Simon,
The National Congress[0] just happened, and the Chinese government does
make a very big deal out of it. I know that many universities were asked
to temporarily block inbound HTTP traffic, which even affected open
source mirrors during that time.
With all this going on it is only natural that something restrictive
happened to the rest of the international network. I'm not exactly sure
what has been done, but it is very likely that it is not your problem.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China
I can confirm, several customers complaining of being suddenly unable to access baidu/weibo and so on
Same conclusion ensues.