Messaging apps Line and Kakao face outages in China.
Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have pushed censors in China to block many foreign internet products which includes messaging apps like Line and Kakao Talk, and also Microsoft’s OneDrive Storage facility. The outages in the product had begun earlier this week, after a rally in Hong Kong brought about half a million people onto the streets on July 1, 2014.
Line is still probing into the access problems, but is yet to find a cause. The popular Japan based social networking app allows users to send photos, messages and make voice calls. The outages in the service began from July 1, 2014 and due to this, many of the users have been struggling to send and receive messages over the app.
Meanwhile, Kakao, the company behind the messaging product Kakao Talk, was also not sure about the causes of the disruption in services. The subscribers who have registered themselves with the app are still not sure why they cannot chat and make voice calls.
On the other hand, Microsoft on July, 4, 2014 said that it is also investigating the exact cause of the disruptions in its OneDrive storage facility.
This is not the first time China has taken stringent censorship measures, Facebook – the most popular social networking site across the globe – is officially banned in China and about a month back, the country had also blocked access to all Google Products including its search engine.
Photo Credits: Adage
