Chinese search engine Baidu was taken off air for more than several hours today, apparently by Iranian hackers.
Chinese online newsites said readers had reported outages from all parts of the country.
Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, was unavailable from 7am, when users said they either could not open the page or were directed to a English language Yahoo error page.
A message claiming to be from the “Iranian cyber army” was also posted to the site. Reportedly, a sentence in Farsi said the hack was “in reaction to the US authorities' intervention in Iran's internal affairs. This is a warning,” AFP reported.
Baidu said the site had been restored at 11.20am, but users said they still experienced trouble until 2pm, Sohu IT said.
Baidu CEO Robin Li said in a blog post that the hacking was “unprecedented”.