Chinese websites loading slower recently?

Fri Oct 20 21:27:38 UTC 2017

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

-- 
  Tianhao Xiao 
  hxiao at dargasea.com

On Fri, 20 Oct 2017, at 08:51, Simon Lockhart wrote:
> 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