China experiences connectivity degradation lasting over nine hours

China experienced a significant degradation in internet connectivity beginning on July 15, 2026, and lasting for more than nine hours. The disruption was most pronounced in network traffic volume measurements, with a severity score of 46,030 recorded during the event window.

Technical Details

The degradation was observed between 15:08 UTC on July 15 and 00:30 UTC on July 16. The primary affected signal was the merit-nt measurement, which acts as a proxy for aggregate connectivity based on backscatter analysis. This signal showed a drop of 28% from its peak value during the event.

Other signals showed lesser impacts. The gtr signal, which measures traffic volume, recorded a 33% drop from its peak. The normalized traffic forecast deviation, gtr-norm, showed a 20% drop. In contrast, control-plane BGP visibility and active probing reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes remained largely stable, showing minimal deviation.

Reported Cause

The cause of the connectivity degradation has not been publicly attributed.

Network conditions were observed to have returned to baseline levels by the end of the monitoring period.