All of the world is focused on just one airplane right now. Chinese, Taiwanese, and U.S. leadership, as well as internet users around the world, are included. The Taiwanese presidential website was attacked early Tuesday, according to an anonymous source. When Gizmodo tried to load pages on the presidential site early Tuesday, all we got was a single line of text: "OK."
Taiwanese presidential spokesman Chang Tun-Han claimed in a Facebook post that the site was hit by an overseas distributed denial of service attack and that normal operations have resumed within 20 minutes. The attack doesn't seem like it's comparable to China's hacking capability
Things are not okay during this morning of heightened tension. Nancy Pelosi's tour of several U.S. allies, including Singapore and Malaysia, is being watched by the world. Pelosi is expected to visit Taiwan for an official meeting. According to anonymous sources, Chinese warplanes were flying over the Taiwan Strait Monday. The ships are moving toward the official line. The planes are not there.
More unnamed sources have told outlets like the Financial Times that Pelosi's visit with Taiwan's President was supposedly scheduled for Wednesday, though neither Pelosi's people nor Taiwanese officials have dared make any public mention of the meeting. She is supposed to meet with activists who complain about Chinese human rights record.
Thousands of people are receiving minute-to-minute updates on Pelosi's plane. Flight tracking app Flightradar 24 said that 300,000 people had been following the flight. The plan left Malaysia at 4 pm Tuesday. The demand for flight updates was so high that it crashed the website.
Chinese social media was almost boiling over with resentment towards America because of the many unknowns about the visit. Business Insider reported Tuesday that the popular Chinese social media app Weibo saw a lot of topics related to Pelosi's visit. According to a report, the leading # about U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken saw over 600 million views in 6 hours.
Many users were upset about Pelosi's "provocation" and the possibility of war with the U.S. over Taiwan, a country long-claimed by Beijing. It is best not to derive any sense of national temperature checking from the comments of a few million people.
Taiwan knows of the threat of military invasion. The country has a survival guide for its citizens.
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