Chinese officials Wednesday blamed a country-wide Internet outage on a hack attack. But security and networking experts suspect that the country's Internet infrastructure was compromised when Chinese government censors inadvertently blocked every website in the world.

What's Chinese for schadenfreude?

The official story from China didn't involve stifling freedom of expression. Instead, government officials blamed a domain name system (DNS) malfunction Tuesday for leaving the country's nearly 600 million Internet users without access to websites for 45 minutes. "We have tracked and analyzed the DNS and found that at least two of the 13 root name servers around the world were affected," said Dong Fang, an Internet engineer at Chinese security product vendor Qihoo 360, according to the Xinhua News Agency, which is the Chinese government's official press agency.

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