: 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.

  • SoupBrick@pawb.socialEnglish
    92·
    23 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·
      23 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·
      23 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!