In a strange turn of events, it’s looking the internet outage suffered by hundreds of millions was due to simple error.

On January 21st, millions of Chinese internet users who typed in the name of their favorite websites were instead redirected. Disturbingly enough to Chinese officials, the redirection took them to the page of a U.S. company called Dynamic Internet Technology or DIT, which could help the page visitors evade Chinese censorship.

The location made may speculate regarding who was responsible for problem. Qin Gang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said during a news briefing that he had notes in his possession that suggested the involvement of Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a spiritual group that has been blamed for past hacking attacks on Chinese censorship. First introduced to China in 1992, the group has been outlawed in Communist China since 1999, mainly due to concerns about their size.

It turns out that the DIT company’s founder, Bill Xua, is also a member of Falun Gong. This connection lead many to presume that Falun Gong was at the center of yet another series of internet woes the Chinese government.

Incredible: A mistake by Chinese Internet censors caused the biggest Internet failure in history http://t.co/wk4QKaevAA

— PD Smith (@PD_Smith) January 23, 2014

If anyone should understand "Karma"… China Blames Massive Internet Blackout On Hackers – http://t.co/coac0IZb56 # #china, #infosec

— Examiner Account2 (@AlanHHeyman) January 23, 2014

However, today the story has changed, and despite the odd coincidence, it’s thought that neither Bill Xua or the Falun Gong have anything at all to due with what happened.

Chinese officials think that the “Great Firewall” suffered a massive glitch during changes to the system which lead to the accidental redirection of millions of citizens to a “here’s how to dodge Chinese censorship” type site.

Was the epic glitch the result of an employee’s bad case of Freudian slippage? The investigation into what happen is still ongoing so we may find out. For now, it’s believed that it was a simple accident and no hacking was involved whatsoever.

Image via ForbiddenChinaNews