X

Google access restored in China, says report

Google, Gmail, and other Google offerings seem to be available again, after an apparent blockage coinciding with the start of the 18th Communist Party Congress, and related protests.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
See full bio
Edward Moyer
2 min read

Google, Gmail, and other Google services seem to be accessible again in China this morning, according to a report, after an outage that coincided with the start of the once-a-decade meeting to appoint a new Communist government.

Access to the services returned after 6 a.m. local time, after an approximately 12-hour outage, according to IDC News Service, which cited Google's Transparency Report, along with confirmation from GreatFire.org, a group that monitors Internet censorship in China.

Early yesterday, California time, data provided by Google's Transparency Report showed a sharp drop off in traffic to Google's Web sites -- to roughly half the normal amount. Google sent CNET a statement in the late morning saying, "We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end."

Related stories

The day before, on Thursday, the 18th Communist Party Congress began in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People near Tiananmen Square. And as The New York Times noted in its item on the Google outage, the Communist government has been known to impose, in the days leading up to the congress, clampdowns "ranging from replacing books in bookstores to banning balloons because they could carry messages of protest."

The International Business Times reported this morning that China has heightened security to "wartime levels" because of the party congress and noted that several Tibetans had set themselves on fire in recent days to protest the Chinese regime. Chinese officials threatened harsh sentencing to anyone distributing imagery of those self-immolations, the IBT reported.

Google itself has been wrestling with censorship in China for more than half a decade. In April, Google Drive was blocked. Even after Google switched to a Hong Kong domain in 2010, sensitive topics remained off-limits.

That history is in keeping with other efforts by Chinese authorities to control the online realm. Last December, Beijing's city government announced rules requiring users of local Twitter-like sites to register their real names for verification by government authorities--a move apparently meant to quash anonymous posts critical of China's leaders and rob dissidents of a tool for organizing protests.