r.i.p. | twitter & flickr blocked in china? ::
:: I blame Ai Weiwei, of course. In addition to the ongoing inaccessibility of Blogspot.com and Youtube.com, Twitter.com and Flickr.com now both appear to have been blocked in mainland China. At the time of writing, Twitter was still (sorta) accessible via desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, Twirl, etc., but I think that was because the API URL hadn’t been fully harmonized yet. That being said, these clients were definitely not acting normal – very spotty and unstable. The desktop clients will likely be rendered useless soon enough if this is a real blockage and not just a massive coincidental glitch in the Chinese Internet – highly unlikely. None of the major local Chinese microblogging platforms have been affected: Fanfou.com, Jiwai.de, Zuosa.com, etc., but that’s probably because of internal content monitoring systems that have long been in place. If you are in China, please feel free to comment below about accessibility to these sites (and others) in your locales. Thanks. // AjS
Also, as always, Danwei.org is following this closely – head over there in case I have missed anything.
[UPDATE 1: Microsoft properties Live.com and Bing.com are also inaccessible in China. MSN instant messenger to follow?]
[UPDATE 2: It appears Twitter is not working via desktop clients, rendering it completely blocked.]
[UPDATE 3: It appears Hotmail.com is also inaccessible. That makes three major Microsoft property down in China.]
[UPDATE 4: It may just be cached files in my browser or something, but it appears 56minus1 is displaying Flickr-embedded images – the site wasn't doing that earlier. Can anyone else in China confirm this? The Flickr domain itself is still inaccessible.]
[UPDATE 5: Chinese microblog service Fanfou.com and P2P download service VeryCD.com will be performing "technical maintenance" until June 6th. H/T Jason Zhan Jia]
[UPDATE 6: Yawn.... Can we move on?]
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Neither is loading for me here in Beijing. -Vance
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:46 pm
flickr twitter hotmail live.com are all blocked this afternoon
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Yep, twitter is blocked here in Beijing…
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Why yes, it’s a most harmonious day down here in Guangxi. Flickr, Twitter are completely gone. Google time outs for some very innocuous searches. Something has been amiss with my VPN as well. For a few days now it is much slower than normal.
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
[...] 56minus1 speculates this may have to do with Ai Weiwei joining Twitter. Lostlaowai says it has to do with that special 20th anniversary on Thursday. [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
[From Beijing CBD] The Twitter site is blocked but I’m using tweetgrid and I can get my friend stream to come through. No such luck for searching. What a sad day..
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Hi Adam, I cannot access them as well.
Damned！ [5+1] 4
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Twitter is blocked in Changsha although mobile access is no problem as well as using desktop clients instead of the website.
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
twitter, hotmail and flickr were all working this morning, but not now (guizhou). Odd, if this is anything to do with bing (as suggested else where) as typing bing.com into a browser just redirected you to a blank bing.cn before anyway.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Holy toledo, neither work for me here in Shanghai either. Can’t get on Twitter via TweetDeck either.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 pm
nothing here either..
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Hotmail is able to access now (Shanghai)
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:46 pm
[...] flooding in from around the internet have confirmed that Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail (see update below), Live, [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 11:33 am
hot main works in shanghai but flickr isn’t working