The Los Angeles Times reports on the brief outage of the Great Firewall over the weekend:
Cautious excitement spread on some social-networking platforms as hope flared that Internet freedoms suddenly were being expanded after months of intensifying scrutiny.
“It’s finally unblocked, reasons unknown,” wrote a blogger named EFanZh. “I hope nothing gets blocked anymore. I can’t take it any longer.”
But by the time many woke up, strict restrictions had returned. Error messages once again flashed across computer screens for sites blocked by the nation’s censorship filter.
“It seemed just like a dream,” said Michael Anti, a social critic and one of hundreds who tweeted about the development on Twitter.
Rumors abounded that the outage was due to maintenance work administered by Internet provider China Unicom. Others reasoned it had something to do with the heavy snow that blanketed northern China over the weekend.
