Back in the day, most every ISP that came online would take down the internet by broadcasting bad data to their upstream router.
Basically, a new router goes online, and says something like "Hey guys, I'm here, and BTW, if you route through me, you can see the ENTIRE internet".
This used to be a regular occurrence (maybe once every few months), and would last for minutes to hours.
Of course, the internet has grown a lot since then, and people are no longer accepting this kind of idiocy (because this really is just caused by some moron network administrator somewhere), and so they try harder to make network changes with proper change management procedures and paperwork that avoids this kind of mess, BUT it can and does still happen.  When some guy does it here, he's called an idiot.  When it happens in China, we call it a conspiracy.
Unfortunately, that's not really fair in this case, because the blame is entirely in the hands of the ISP's HERE who accepted that bogus route data as if it were correct. 
Put another way: If I were to say that you could get onto the internet faster by throwing your computer in the bathtub, whose fault would it be if you did this, and got pissed that you missed something on eBay because of that?
Hopefully this is a kick in the pants to ISP's here to get their crap together.  With today's equipment, there's no excuse for routers to blindly accept this kind of data.