'Error' blamed as China Unicom network suffers major outage across mainland

Many China Unicom customers across mainland China complained of being disconnected for more than half an hour today, including websites hosted on the major network.

Users and subscribers under state-owned Unicom began reporting connection problems at about 11.30am, Beijing time, taking to popular microblog Weibo to vent their frustration.

“My WeChat messages couldn’t be sent, and my 3G network was down. Even the 10010 service hotline was busy,” said one China Unicom user on Weibo.

Many reports said websites and apps could not be accessed on smartphones, computers and other devices during the period.

Connections reportedly went back up and running at around 12.10pm, about 40 minutes after the network went down. 

China Unicom said on its Weibo that an error on a unit of its backbone network led to the outage for some broadband users from 11.25am to 11.45am. No more details were given.