A recent outage is being traced to a router, according to news reports in Beijing papers, but no blame as officially been pointed Cisco's way.

The July 12 afternoon outage cut Internet access for 200,000 subscribers of Beijing Netcom, a China Netcom subsidiary, according to reports. Beijing Netcom serves more than 2 million subscribers.

The People's Daily Online notes that a "responsible official" yesterday pinned the outage on a router rather than on human error. But China Netcom has made no formal statement saying Cisco's equipment was at fault.

"There is no statement from China Netcom assigning and no statement from Cisco accepting blame for it," a Cisco spokesman says. "The talk that it's all due to a Cisco router is hearsay." The spokesman adds that the outage lasted about 20 minutes; reports from China say it took an hour for Internet connectivity to return to normal.

Cisco and China Netcom are investigating the cause of the outage, the spokesman says.

— Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading