Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House.

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

Wyoming Corporate Services, the registered agent for Sophidea Incorporated, according to Internet records, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

It was not immediately clear what caused the traffic shift Tuesday. One Chinese newspaper suspected a cyberattack. But by late Tuesday, some technologists had come to an alternate theory: a backfiring of China’s own Internet censoring system.

Sophidea appears to be a service that redirects traffic from one address to another to mask a person’s whereabouts — or to evade a firewall.

Some technologists surmised Tuesday that the disruption may have been caused by Chinese Internet censors who attempted to block traffic to Sophidea’s websites but mistakenly redirected traffic to the service instead.

That theory was buttressed by the fact that a separate wave of Chinese Internet traffic Tuesday was simultaneously redirected to Internet addresses owned by Dynamic Internet Technology, a company that helps people evade China’s Great Firewall, and is typically blocked in China.

Bill Xia, who created Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001, told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that his company had nothing to do with the traffic shift and also suspected that the problem was the doing of China’s own Internet censors.

The disruption mirrored a similar incident in 2002 when Chinese Internet users attempting to access Sina.com were redirected to a banned website belonging to followers of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China.

Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco. David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai.