Great Firewall hiccup? China loses Internet connectivity for an hour

Thursday Internet traffic dropped off substantially to and from China. Paul Mozur of the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog tracked the outage as a data dropoff lasting from 11:00am to 1:00pm local time.

The interruption spawned a host of possible explanations. These included the powerful 8.6 magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Indonesia, a cinching down of the “Great Firewall of China” censorship system, a failure in the country’s network backbone, and a software upgrade.