There's a moat around Beijing

This Wednesday marks the beginning of the 19th Party Plenum. Unless you are extremely familiar with China you're probably wondering, "what in the world is a Party Plenum?" I have spent years connected to China and was unfamiliar with the word, but not the idea behind it. Every five years the Communist Party has a big, secretive meeting where they decide who their leaders are going to be and unknown other things about China's future. When I lived in Baotou I would comment on how relaxed things were because Baotou was politically very far from Beijing (geographically it's not actually that far), but now I live IN Beijing. Events like the upcoming Plenum create for interesting situations.
It all started a few weeks ago. It was a regular evening and I am my colleagues were all in our respective homes watching Netflix and using other western media sites using our VPNs (as you are most likely aware China has the Golden Shield Project that most foreigners call the "Great Firewall." This prevents people in China from accessing about 70% of all outside websites including all Google products and western blog hosting platforms). All of the sudden most of our VPNs went out. We started chatting on WeChat and sharing which servers were still working. Prior to this, I had read an article that said China has to discover each of the VPN servers one-by-one and since it wouldn't be effective to cut the connection to a single server, they would wait until they had discovered a number of connections and then cut them all at the same time. This is, as was confirmed by our VPN provider, in fact, what they did. Our VPN provider worked hard and in about 24 hours or so had all of the servers reconnected.  According to articles I've read online, the government called for an extra layer of protection around Beijing which was deemed a fire moat. This so-called fire moat is a second firewall just around Beijing. This appears to have gone into effect last Friday. All of the sudden the servers went down. Based on messages from the VPN provider and my personal experience, it appears that China is currently constantly cutting connections and the VPN provider (I'm intentionally not stating which one I use) is restoring a few. They have informed users in China that they are working around the clock to maintain service and directed us to use one of only three servers.
Over the weekend, one of my colleagues sent us a message warning of long waits and complete screenings and pat downs to enter the subway. I only went into the main part of the city once (for church on Sunday) and didn't encounter any of this, but today's Beijinger (an English-language publication) showed pictures of security lines at subway stations taking up to 2 hours! Boy am I glad that I don't have to commute via public transportation!
Finally, today our administration sent us a WeChat message informing us that for the next several days (the actual number is unknown) any packages being sent from outside of Beijing will be stopped from entering the city. Thus, there really is a moat around Beijing.