.Mac sites being blocked in China?

We're receiving a number of reports indicating that certain .Mac services are either being blocked or are inexplicably out across China. Reasons to suspect a blockage rather than an outage -- albeit speculative -- include the fact that iDisks, iWeb site updating and other functions are operational, but access to Web.mac.com and Homepage.mac.com sites is not.

One reader, Mike Cecil, writes:

"Apparently dotmac hosted web sites have been blocked in China. I reported the issue to Apple support, and they quickly responded with a number of questions. I also posted a note on .mac user discussion board; a number of people have confirmed my problem. Any page beginning with Web.mac.com is blocked. All other iDisk functions operate normally. In fact iWeb will update my site. My email works fine."

"I just cannot log onto any page beginning with web.mac.com (unless of course you use some kind of clever proxy software). I don't know how many readers you have in China, but it is a pretty big place and the issue seems to be affecting a lot of .mac users here."

So far, access has been restricted in the following areas (per user reports):

• Beijing
• Shenzhen
• Hunan
• Hangzhou
• Zhuhai

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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