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Gmail traffic trickles back into China

Google's data shows Gmail traffic slowly rising again in China after a four-day outage.

Roger_Cheng.jpg
Roger_Cheng.jpg
Roger Cheng Former Executive Editor / Head of News
Roger Cheng (he/him/his) was the executive editor in charge of CNET News, managing everything from daily breaking news to in-depth investigative packages. Prior to this, he was on the telecommunications beat and wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal for nearly a decade and got his start writing and laying out pages at a local paper in Southern California. He's a devoted Trojan alum and thinks sleep is the perfect -- if unattainable -- hobby for a parent.
Expertise Mobile, 5G, Big Tech, Social Media Credentials
  • SABEW Best in Business 2011 Award for Breaking News Coverage, Eddie Award in 2020 for 5G coverage, runner-up National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for culture analysis.
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Roger Cheng

Gmail is starting to see life again in China.

Google's e-mail service has seen a slight uptick in traffic going into the country, according to the company's Transparency Report. The Financial Times (subscription required) was the first to notice that access had returned.

The increase hints at the end of a four-day outage in China, one with no explanation. Greatfire.org, a China-based anticensorship group, suggested the country may have been responsible, Reuters reported.

Google told CNET in an e-mail that there was nothing on its end that caused the outage, while a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told Reuters that she wasn't aware of an issue.

A spokesman from the Consulate General of China's office in New York couldn't be reached for comment about the outage.

Google has had problems operating in China for years, and the country blocked Gmail access to its browsers in June ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A loophole that allowed users to access Gmail through Microsoft's Outlook or Apple's email client had been closed over the past four days. That loophole has once again opened.