On the evening of August 12th and the morning of August 13th, a large-scale internet anomaly occurred in Beijing, involving multiple operators including China Unicom and China Mobile.
This morning, many Beijing residents reported that their mobile internet was not working, preventing them from using applications for internet browsing, ride-hailing, payment services, and even making phone calls. Some netizens mentioned that WeChat mini programs, community water purifiers, and electric vehicle charging stations all displayed “system loading failed” messages, only being able to function properly when connected to Wi-Fi.
Several businesses were also affected. Alibaba Cloud announced that at 12:44 am on the 13th, they detected abnormal access to cloud services from Beijing mobile networks, preliminarily confirming an issue with the operators and promptly reporting it for troubleshooting. An energy company announced that a fault in Beijing mobile networks caused their charging equipment to stop functioning, awaiting repairs from the operator. Users also reported problems with China Telecom’s network.
Beijing Mobile later responded on their official Weibo account, stating that on the morning of August 13th, a small number of users experienced issues with certain apps or mini programs, which were being investigated and gradually restored. By noon, many users confirmed that communication services had been reinstated.
Just the previous night, Beijing Unicom’s DNS service also experienced abnormalities, leading to the inability to access certain websites and applications. Users from multiple locations reported domain names being incorrectly resolved to 127.0.0.2, resulting in apps like Douyin (TikTok) and Weibo being inaccessible. One netizen described the situation as “Unicom’s DNS issue last night, followed by Beijing Mobile’s problems this morning, it’s really unbelievable.”
At the time of these incidents, Beijing’s security measures were being enhanced in preparation for the upcoming September military parade of the Chinese Communist Party. The consecutive two-day internet anomalies have sparked significant external attention and speculation.