Looks like one of the most sensational moments in Internet history can be tied down to the quaint state of Wisconsin. Um, go Badgers?

As you likely know by now, perhaps the biggest Internet failure ever occurred on Tuesday. For up to eight hours, hundreds of millions of people in China could not get online. Since the sudden shutdown, theories have abounded as to what caused the outage. Many point to the Chinese government, which has been known to routinely pull the Internet. Some techies think the outage was not purposeful, but was rather a result of a mistake within the country's "Great Firewall," which is designed to prohibit antigovernment web behavior. 

As investigations into the matter have deepened, we've come to learn that things are a little more complicated than that, and a lot odder than expected.

It's looking like the massive outage is tied to China's domain name-servers, which went a bit haywire. These servers, which operate like a switchboard, routed Internet traffic from popular sites in China to an internet address that is registered under Sophidea, a company based in Cheyenne, Wyo. Tech experts say that with so much of China's Internet traffic flooding Sophidea’s Internet address, a crash was inevitable, and could happen in an instant. The brick house wherein Sophidea operates has a sketchy past. Reuters (News - Alert) profiled the building, which has housed some shady operations, including illegal online gambling and the selling of counterfeit materials.

Sophidea is not responding to media inquiries, and chances are they won't be doing so without legal representation. The firm's managers are not publicly listed and they may not be exemplary role models of how to run a business, to put it mildly, but we'll have to wait to find out the full story. The Internet has always been a touchy subject in China, with this disaster under its belt, the controversy surrounding it is bound to magnify.