China Telecom customers in Anhui Province were unable to access online websites for three hours last night, the second time they have experienced an "Internet collapse" this month.

China Telecom, one of the country's largest Internet service providers, said the service outage was caused by server malfunctions. Customers of other Internet service providers, such as China Unicom, were unaffected by the service outage, which lasted from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

But according to the Anhui Internet Information Center, server malfunctions would not have been able to cause such a widespread paralysis. Instead, the cause is more likely to have been a hacker attack to the domain name system.

Other online services, such as instant messaging, were still available. Many people have asked departments responsible for Internet affairs to learn from the outage and develop an emergency response plan to ensure the safety of the Internet.