China upgraded its Great Firewall to prevent services from getting around government censorship. The upgrade affected at least Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that experienced disruptions in their services on Friday.
Users of VPN providers, such as Astrill, StrongVPN, and Golden Frog, experienced difficulties in accessing foreign websites. Chinese people have relied on these VPNs to get external news sources, while non-Chinese residents and businesses use them for regular communications.
Some of the disruptions reported by VPN users included pages that change day per day and difficulty loading websites that are based in the United States and Australia. People were also unable to access Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
Source of The Global Times stated that the Chinese government decided to block the VPNs to force citizens to participate in its Internet censorship measures. There is more than 600 million Internet users in China.
"It is because of the Great Firewall upgrade, and unfortunately, we can't tell you the exact time [about how long it will last]," said the anonymous service support employee.
Golden Frog spokesman Andrew Staples believes that the Chinese authorities intensified the Great Firewall by combining two techniques: deep packet inspection to determine the VPN connection and IP blocking to close the traffic coming from the VPN.
"This week's attack on VPNs that affected us and other VPN providers is more sophisticated than what we've seen in the past," Sunday Yokubaitis, president of Golden Frog, said in a statement.
So what will be China's next steps after blocking VPNs? Beijing-based Robert Blohm, in Friday's Nelson Report and quoted by Forbes, said that the authorities might soon introduce a "white list" or the list of approved websites that its citizens are allowed to view, similar to an intranet.
