U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan briefly crashed Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on Tuesday night, as millions in the country discussed and debated her Asia trip.
The microblogging platform apologized for a half-hour outage of its mobile app in the period immediately before Pelosi’s landing, at 10:40 p.m. on Tuesday, when countless messages tracking her plane flooded social media.
Pelosi’s trip, which marks the most senior U.S. official visit to Taiwan in a quarter century, is seen as a provocation by Beijing, which considers Taiwan a part of its territory.