I tried from within China and then from outside (using vpn) and Skritter.com seems dead. .cn is alright though....

Same here (Florida). No access to .com but .cn working great.

What do you get, just no server response, or a problem on the practice page, or what?

No server response. or at least it was. checking it now its back. glitch in the matrix?

FYI its back from both inside and outside China.

I'm sorry about this. I don't know what's going on, and I'm not seeing any issues in my logs or anything. It seems that for the past few days, people are reporting strange problems, usually relating to the GFW, but I can't quite pin things down, and not sure if they ever couldn't get through with skritter.cn or not.

its a tricky one. Obviously it could be the fault of some of the _very_ patchy isps here in CN having dodgy DNS lookups... but that wouldn't explain it not working through the VPN (I tried 2 different VPN locations outside of China and sanity checked that other sites were loading ok), I always use a VPN from here for Skritter.

I was lucky in that I looked up "skritter.com down" on google then accessed a cached forum post that told me about the skritter.cn domain. Most others might give up.

I'm not bitching, just wondering if there is some way of letting users now about the alternate URL.... but I don't have any suggestions of my own yet.

Personally.... I'm moving to HK next month so that'll fix this for me :)

FWIW I also noticed skritter.com down last night (I think around 9 PM Eastern Time) and I'm in the US. Skritter.cn worked fine.

I'm in Shanghai and for the past few days .com hasn't been working at all - won't load, but .cn is fine.

I'm keeping both eyes on the downtime reports. I know that skritter.com has been hit recently from China because of an issue with Google Hosting Services, but skritter.cn should be immune to that. As soon as I have something to act on, I will swoop down!

We do redirect to skritter.cn for users whose IP matches China and who hit the front page when not logged in. Only works if people use skritter.cn to get there afterwards, when there's a downtime. Not much we can do, unfortunately.