In a blog post published by censorship watchdog GreatFire.org, it read that Google services appeared to have been disrupted by the Chinese government days before the mainland celebrates the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around the iconic Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The services that were affected in the disruption were Google's main search engine and Gmail, among several of its other services since last week at least. The disruption has made many og Google's services inaccessible to users in China.
The watchdog noted that the last time a similar action was done happened two years ago, which only lasted 12 hours.
The advocacy group said, "It is not clear that the block is a temporary measure around the anniversary or a permanent block. But because the block has lasted for four days, it's more likely that Google will be severely disrupted and barely usable from now on."
Although falling short of acknowledging whether it has received disruption complaints from its customers in China, a Google spokesman said instead, "We've checked extensively and there's nothing wrong on our end."
On the other hand, the company's transparency report showed lower activity levels from the mainland beginning Friday, Reuters said. The data could indicate that there has been a significant amount of service disruption.
Google, who initially stationed a Chinese unit in Beijing, has moved the unit to Hong Kong and mentioned that the relocation was due to rampant censorship. It is to note that the Chinese government has already blocked popular foreign websites Facebook, Twitter and even Google's popular video site YouTube. Reuters said that China has strict controls in place on what can be said on the Web, and that the government has been tightening such restrictions further.
Several users of Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service in China, has sounded off their government's censorship measures. One user wrote, "Those officials are driving me crazy with this!"
