All websites with the .cn suffix were inaccessible for several hours over last weekend. The China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) identified the incident as a distributed denial of service, or DDos, attack.

The center said the attacks began early on Sunday and came in two major waves. Exactly where the attacks originated from and how long they lasted is still unknown.

Websites reported varying disruption times, with some cached pages even remaining accessible during the outage.

The CINIC said it is restoring service and is working to improve its top-level domain security to safeguard against similar attacks.

The first wave began at about midnight. It lasted around two hours and interrupted services. The problem was fixed by our engineers at around 2 a.m. Only a few users were affected. At 4 am, another wave came. This is the largest-ever attack on the Chinese domain name servers in history.

"Luckily, the attack did not affect many internet-users. The operation of the dot C-N domain name resumed at 9 am on Sunday morning," said Qi Lin, deputy director of the center.

(CNTV.cn August 27, 2013)