China's "Twitter/Facebook" Somehow Redirected to Internet Censorship Breaker Site

Weibo Goes Down in China, Traffic Redirected to Freedom Software

Weibo, one of China’s most popular websites with over 500 million users, was offline for two hours on Jan. 20. The traffic was being redirected to an address run by Freegate, a tool blocked in China that lets users break through China’s system for Internet censorship.

Weibo is China’s state-approved social media network, like a cross between Facebook and Twitter—both of which are blocked in China. On Tuesday afternoon, with Weibo back online, the issue was the top discussion with 269,068 Chinese users talking about it. One user, ITHome, said in Chinese: “What IP is 65.49.2.178? It’s sure to go down in history.”

The IP, or “Internet Protocol” address, the user referred to is one of the channels Freegate provides that allows Chinese users to route their connections through and access websites otherwise blocked in China.

Nobody is quite sure what happened, exactly. Even Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes Freegate, is still trying to analyze what took place.

“We thought it was an attack,” said Xia. “From our perspective, we observed excessive, abnormal traffic to one of our IPs.”

[link to www.theepochtimes.com]