The world has been left puzzled after China mysteriously cut itself off from the global internet for over 60 minutes last week. with many people speculating on why it might have happened.
Taking place last Wednesday (August 20), a Chinese internet blackout occurred, impacting services from the likes of Apple and Tesla.
According to experts, this may have been due to a configuration error or could have been an intentional test of new GFW capabilities, which refers to a censorship and surveillance system used by the Chinese government to regulate the internet within mainland China, known as the Great Firewall of China.
An activist group known as Great Firewall Report noticed the blackout and reported on it, writing that the outage cut off all traffic to TCP port 443, which is a standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.
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On its website, the group wrote: “Between approximately 00:34 and 01:48 (Beijing Time, UTC+8) on August 20, 2025, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) exhibited anomalous behavior by unconditionally injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to disrupt all connections on TCP port 443.”
How was Tesla impacted by the internet blackout in China?
Tesla was indirectly affected by the blackout, but how? This is due to the fact that Tesla services rely on connectivity to servers located outside of China, which would have been unresponsive during the blackout.
However, this was a temporary disruption as service was restored when the blackout ended.
While Tesla does have manufacturing operations in Shanghai, these are likely to have not been impacted by the blackout as they rely on local Chinese infrastructure.
Many people have taken to social media to speculate on what the reason could be for the internet outage.
On Reddit, one user shared a suggestion, writing: “They have a military parade coming up. That and a big meet for their next 5 year plan. They do often cut VPNs etc when big internal things are on. They don’t want stuff getting out, or in.”
Another said: “It’s probably more than internal censorship. Testing internet cut off makes sense from a war preparation point of view…”
A third person commented: “Any country should do these drills. Companies do it all the time, it's called a failover test. If your national infrastructure relies completely on another country or continent then you have way bigger problems than a 1 hour induced outage.”
And a fourth added: “Stop giving Trump ideas.”