Rumors began to surface late on Tuesday that Facebook could no longer get past the Great Firewall of China.
The company has acknowledged the situation but could not confirm a reason why. "We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in China are having difficulty getting access to Facebook," representatives from the social network said in a statement. "We have not made any changes to our site that would create access problems and are looking into the situation."
As early as Tuesday morning, a Wall Street Journal report suggested that Facebook members in China were having issues accessing the site, but the story gained little traction and suggested that technical difficulties may have been to blame.
China-based users of Twitter, many of them expatriates from the United States and Europe, painted a more suspicious picture. "Facebook is blocked in China," one said later on Tuesday. "There are going to be a lot of very p***ed off people here. What next, Twitter?"
"I'm on China Netcom and have the same issues with Facebook IP numbers, so it's not just China Telecom," another Twitter user said in response to theories that Facebook downages were related to Internet service providers.
However, CNET China's Rick Martin reports that access to the social-networking site is "off and on", but it "doesn't look like a block". Martin pinged the site and got a "unusual result"--30 percent packet loss. "Which kinda reflects the behavior I'm seeing--sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," he said.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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China blocking access to Facebook?
Yep, I'm in China right now, and both facebook AND twitter are blocked.
They seem to sporadically not block it, and then block it again... I'm not really sure why.
Posted by anonymous on Tuesday, July 07 2009 08:04 PM