Chinese Google block was merely technical glitch

Google has withdrawn a report that its services were almost completely blocked in China. It now says a technical error may have overstated the extent of the blocking.

The report stemmed from a page Google set up — hosted outside of China — with status updates on its services in the country. It set the page up after making the decision to no longer censor results in line with Chinese government demands, instead leaving government filters to do the dirty work. There has also been tension over Google’s attempts to redirect Chinese users to its site in Hong Kong, from they can see uncensored results, even if the linked pages remain inaccessible.

Yesterday the page reported widespread unavailability of services, with Gmail operating as normal, news and images partly blocked, and all other services (including the main search tool) completely blocked.

Predictably enough that prompted widespread speculation that there may have been a dispute between Google and the Chinese government leading to technical repercussions.

That’s proven not to be the case. Google has now replaced the relevant entries on the status page with a note reading:

Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.

The incident has also highlighted the fact that the status page isn’t real-time information, but rather a daily update. That bring up the possibility that a brief glitch which occurs at the wrong time could become the official status for the entire day, which appears to have happened in this case.

Things now appear to be back to normal, though normal in this case means that services such as YouTube, Blogger, Picasa and the auto-suggest tool remain completely blocked, while newsgroups, Docs and mobile access remain partially blocked.

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