Update | Google services partially disrupted in China ahead of Tiananmen anniversary
Several key services provided by Google have been partly inaccessible in China since Sunday, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in 1989 approaches.
Several key services provided by Google have been partly inaccessible in China since Sunday, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in 1989 approaches. The June 4 crackdown is widely commemorated online every year.
“The block is indiscriminate as all Google services [from] all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China,” according to a blog post on GreatFire.org, a Chinese internet censorship watchdog that first noted the Google outages over the weekend.
A Google spokesperson in Hong Kong declined to comment. While Gmail, Picasa and other Google services were accessible to some users based in the mainland, many complained about problems of access on their microblogs.
Comments on social media about the disruption reflected widespread speculation that it could be related to the crackdown anniversary on Tuesday.
“I support this wise decision by the Communist Party,” one Weibo user commented sarcastically in a post that has since been deleted. “It’s once again May 35,” wrote another, referring to an alternative reference sometimes used online to avoid censorship.
Servers could not access Google.com, Google.com.hk, Gmail.com in Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Yunnan provinces as of Monday morning, according to GreatFire.org’s monitoring service.
