An Internet outage in China that rerouted millions of users to a US website of a company which helps people get around Beijing's censorship might have been a cyber attack.

Users were redirected to a site run by a company tied to the Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in China which has been blamed for past hacking attacks. Chinese security experts claim that the outage could have been exploited by hackers, or could have been the result of a hacking attack.

The outage, which lasted for several hours, was due to a malfunction in China's top-level domain name root servers on Tuesday. Chinese Internet users were rerouted to a U.S.-based website run by Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a company that sells anti-censorship web services tailored for Chinese users.

The Epoch Times, a publication produced by the Falun Gong which is banned in China, is a client and sponsor of DIT.