Overview

• Great Firewall Report measured the disruption from roughly 00:34 to 01:48 Beijing time on August 20, affecting the standard HTTPS port 443.
• Chinese users were unable to reach most sites hosted outside the country, and services that rely on external servers, including Apple iCloud and Tesla features, were interrupted.
• Forensic analysis found unconditional injection of forged TCP RST+ACK packets that terminated connections on port 443.
• The blocking device did not match known Great Firewall fingerprints, pointing to a possible new system or a misconfigured component, with responsibility still unclear.
• Authorities have issued no explanation, and monitors note the single‑port focus is atypical compared with past multi‑port incidents, as separate traffic anomalies were also reported in Pakistan hours earlier.