Fascinating story.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/big-web-crash-in-china-experts-suspect-great-firewall/

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. One of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected about three-quarters of the country’s domain-name system servers.

“I have never seen a bigger outage,” said Heiko Specht, an Internet analyst at Compuware, a technology company based in Detroit. “Half of the world’s Internet users trying to access the Internet couldn’t.”

Those domain-name servers, which act like an Internet switchboard, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites to an Internet address that, according to records, is registered to Sophidea, a company based, at least on paper, in that Wyoming building, in Cheyenne. It is unclear where the company or its servers are physically based, however.