Millions of internet users in China had trouble accessing websites earlier this week after an attack on a domain registrar in that country touched off a network traffic jam.

Internet service in at least five provinces was halted or severely slowed by a chain reaction that was touched off by a distributed denial-of-service attack on the domain name system servers of DNSPod, according to news reports.

People in Shanxi, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Hebei provinces all experienced network outages as a result of the attacks. Some sites such as Baidu, China's top search engine, were inaccessible for some users. Net access returned to normal several hours after the attacks began.

Additional coverage from IDG News, Shanghi Daily, and China Tech News are here, here and here. ®

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