Gmail users in China have been unable to access the popular email service for the past few days, in an extended outage that appears to be the result of government censorship. The company’s transparency report site showed that traffic to Gmail from China plummeted to almost nothing since December 26.
GreatFire, an organization dedicated to advocating for free speech online in China, said that the Chinese government has blocked Gmail, an assessment that Dyn Research concurred with in a tweet.
Google has investigated, and said in a statement emailed to GeekWire that the service isn’t experiencing any technical problems from its side.
@DynResearch confirms China #GFW IP-level block of Google's http://t.co/XhsNku2A6Q when served from #HongKong pic.twitter.com/uV3Y8pgHTQ
— Dyn Research (@DynResearch) December 28, 2014
The block will likely hurt companies and individuals who rely on Gmail for their their email. Blocking the service could push people towards other email providers, especially those based in China. The country slowed Google’s services to a crawl earlier this year ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
