Chinese websites loading slower recently?

[simon at slimey.org (Simon Lockhart)]

All,

I know that access to Chinese websites from outside China is notorious for
being slow or broken, but we seem to have had a major increase in support 
calls from our users over the last couple of weeks, complaining of slow or
no access to major Chinese websites, such as www.baidu.com, www.youku.com and
world.taobao.com. 

We can't find anything on our network that would be affecting this, and at
various times can (and cannot!) reproduce it with off-net connections, which
would indicate that it's an intermittent, but widespread issue.

Is anyone else seeing an increase in problems related to Chinese websites?

Thanks in advance,

Simon