A Chinese website which monitors web outages said that search engine giant Google and many of its popular services including Gmail are being blocked in China. The search engine could not be reached immediately for comment.
Later in an emailed statement Google said that there was nothing wrong from their side. About three ago, Chinese officials had demanded censored search results in the country. Ever since, Google said that it would stop its practice of giving in to Chinese government officials and their demands.
China is considered to be the world’s most populous market for the search engine. A transparency report from Google has showed a decline in traffic to all of its products in the country over the last several hours.
Reports added that the users who were trying to reach Google’s services ended up with vacant IP addresses. More reports suggested that this could even be a step towards ‘fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet’, whereas others have predicted that this could be a temporary move during the leadership transition in China. The search engine has started holding back its products from China since March 2010, after some strained relations with the Chinese government over Google’s allegations that it has been a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack originating in China.
