this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Activist group Great Firewall Report spotted the outage, which it said disrupted all traffic to TCP port 443 – the standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.

“Between approximately 00:34 and 01:48 (Beijing Time, UTC+8) on August 20, 2025, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) exhibited anomalous behavior by unconditionally injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to disrupt all connections on TCP port 443,” the group wrote in a Wednesday post.

That disruption meant Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient. The incident also blocked other services that rely on port 443, which could be more problematic because many services need to communicate with servers or sources of information outside China for operational reasons. For example, Apple and Tesla use the port to connect to offshore servers that power some of their basic services.

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[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 14 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I wonder if this means less cheaters in multiplayer games.

[–] BB84@mander.xyz 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

More. I play in oceania and the cheaters are always english speakers.

Edit: the things you get downvoted for here. should've checked the instance before I commented.

Maybe all 3 of you can come to an agreement somehow?

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Not HTTPS necessarily, but lots use TLS over 443. If you are sending something like login credentials to an online service, it makes sense for the servers to use what is universally available instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, some games may use a launcher that uses HTTPS if they are web-based in some fashion, or maybe the game will use it for certain kinds of API calls unrelated to actual gameplay.

If you are playing a game that uses a dedicated server (or just isn't a competitive game at all), then TLS usage is probably unlikely, but those games aren't lucrative for the account boosting/currency farming that makes cheating so rampant in China anyway.

Even signing up for some games requires you to create an account on their website first.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

There's that game where you made paperclips...

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 53 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

UK govt salivating over this

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 14 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah they don't understand this stuff. They don't even know what a VPN is they're just angry about it.

Actually doing this would be devastating to the economy, and anyway they still need to justify their actions. They can't be openly dictatorial just yet.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 hours ago

"You are all pedos if you are against us" is probably what we will get.

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago

The country of Brexit showed how much they care about devastating the economy

[–] MourningDove@lemmy.zip 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

But… How else will the tankies receive their brainwashing?! Think of the poor propaganda being hurt by this madness!

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 hours ago

Chinese government sanctioned groups can and will still access the broader internet.

[–] comador@lemmy.world 130 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No wonder there were so few Chinese sourced hack attempts in my corporate F5 firewall logs last night lol.

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 44 points 1 day ago

it hurt itself in its confusion!

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 83 points 1 day ago

Just testing the big red button is still working. Nothing to see here, no I mean literally nothing to see here!

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 34 points 23 hours ago (12 children)

Someone should post this in one of the tankie instances. Should be some good content for !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

[–] thyristor@lemmy.pt 5 points 20 hours ago

Hmmmm I should join Piefed.

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[–] SoupBrick@pawb.social 31 points 1 day ago (18 children)
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[–] nul9o9@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Anyone know why someone would use port 443 for anything other than https?

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 17 points 23 hours ago

HTTPS may be the official designation for the port, but it is the de facto standard port for TLS. Whatever you want to send over TLS, doesn't really matter.

HTTPS is just HTTP served over TLS (originally SSL).

Step by step, if you were to analyze a web connection over port 443, you would see that the client first negotiates the TCP connection (via three-way handshake), then TLS, and it's not till after TLS is established that HTTPS is negotiated.

In that way, it's kinda wrong to say it's the HTTPS port. It's really, nowadays, the TLS port. HTTP is just one of many protocols that can ride on top of it, and when we do that, we call it HTTPS.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's lots of things that transport using HTTPS that aren't websites in browsers.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah technically anything can run on any ports, we just like to default certain things.

Ssh for example can work on port 2000 or whatever. Port knocking is fun too.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, it's not even that some other protocol is operating on 443. It's that the underlying transport is HTTPS, just for something that's not a website rendered in a browser by the client. Microsoft, for example, used RPC over HTTPS for Outlook connectivity to Exchange for a hot minute.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago

Ah gotcha. In this case yeah.

[–] Euphoma@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago
[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago

VPNs, DNS over https (DoH), load balancers via DHCP, encrypted remote procedure calls, TCP pipes via gsocket.

I could go on.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

To not get blocked by the great firewall

[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Sometimes mandatory web proxies still allow direct connections to port 443 so as to not break https, which in return means as long as your connection is to port 443, that proxy will pass it through without interfering.

I used to run sshd on port 443 for this reason back when I regularly had to work from client networks.

[–] Zykino@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

Pass thoses firewalls and other corporates proxy/VPN/… that block most ports. If what you build is at least partly used where user have internet access, you know this port is open. Even if 22, 8080 and all the others are closed.

[–] ksigley@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

Happy cake day!

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