At around 22:00 last night in Beijing, a network cluster failure occured that caused temporary Internet outages in many Chinese cities.

The actual failure lasted for several minutes, but it caused a network collapse of about half an hour. As a result, Internet service and network-based instant communications tools were inoperable.

Both China Telecom and network safety experts are deeply concerned with the issue because some experts believe that it is possible that the failure was caused by hackers. The investigation is ongoing.