(Newser) – Hundreds of millions of Internet users in China struggled to get online yesterday after most of the country's web traffic was mysteriously rerouted to a small building in Wyoming. Chinese authorities say the redirection was the result of a glitch in the country's domain system, but analysts believe the Internet traffic ended up in Cheyenne after China's Internet censorship system backfired and redirected traffic to addresses it was supposed to be blocking, reports the New York Times.

The Wyoming building houses a firm called Sophidea—along with some 2,000 other companies, on paper—which runs a service that many Chinese Internet users use to get around censors. Much of the traffic from China, possibly a separate wave, ended up at an IP address belonging to a company called Dynamic Internet Technology. That company is owned by a Chinese anti-censorship advocate who lives in the US, which backs up the theory that the Great Firewall backfired, the Washington Post finds. (Read more China stories.)

