: Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark

Activist group Great Firewall Report spotted the outage, which it said disrupted all traffic to TCP port 443 – the standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.

“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,” the group wrote in a Wednesday post.

That disruption meant Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient. The incident also blocked other services that rely on port 443, which could be more problematic because many services need to communicate with servers or sources of information outside China for operational reasons. For example, Apple and Tesla use the port to connect to offshore servers that power some of their basic services.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
    3416·
    24 days ago

    Pro tip: Posting in non-relevant places about the controversy you personally find very important - even if you’re right - is counterproductive to the very thing you want changed.

    • SoupBrick@pawb.socialEnglish
      364·
      24 days ago

      My friend, this post is about China getting cut off from the rest of the word, most likely due to government censorship.

      The title of this community is Technology.

      It is a PSA about the current steps the US is taking towards similar levels of censorship. This is pretty damn relevant to both the community and the post topic.

      I know some people don’t like it, but politics is part of tons of different communities. Even a crafting community would be affected by the current tariffs.

        • SoupBrick@pawb.socialEnglish
          92·
          24 days ago

          Just as a reminder, you are able to block users if you do not like what they are posting.

          • BaroqueInMind@piefed.socialEnglish
            104·
            24 days ago

            Cool, but I hate living in an echo chamber, and worry remaining an ignorant dipshit like most people here, and I also don’t mind reading things that hurt my feelings. So, no.

          • Nougat@fedia.io
            410·
            24 days ago

            I don’t like to resort to that, but since you’ve suggested it - yeah, I’ll never hear about your concerns again. Thanks! Good job!