StrongVPN and Astrill have been having outages since 2015 started, in general a lot of VPNs are having issues right now. The government is cracking down on VPNs at the moment.
I’m not sure if the current crackdown is related to 2015 beginning (Uber was “officially” banned in China on January 1st also) but the internet crackdown has been a long-standing and perpetually degenerating situation.