r.i.p. | twitter & flickr blocked in china? ::
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009:: 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?]
