Google Buys YouTube For $1.65bn (Photo : Getty Images)
New servers purchased by Google in Asia could have confused China’s censors which explains why Google’s search engine was available to mainland China users for almost two hours.
The search engine of Google, Gmail, Instagram, YouTube and Google photos became available to Chinese users from 11:30 p.m. on Sunday through about 1:15 a.m. on Monday. However, it was blocked again, reported CNBC.
The newly purchased servers of Google had IP addresses likely not recognized immediately by the Great Firewall of China which banned Google in 2010 for refusing to comply with Beijing’s censorship requirement.
Users of Chinese social media sites, such as Weibo and WeChat, initially mistook the availability of Google as the right to free speech restored to Chinese citizens. Li Yue, an IT engineer based in Shenzhen, wrote, “At that moment, I even believed that Google was unblocked and that free speech had come back to [mainland] China again,” quoted The South China Morning Post.
Gongxinhua1 tweeted, “Google temporarily accessible. My friends are all talking about it. It seems everybody is psyched, doing all kinds of searches,” quoted The Washington Post.
Someone searched Google for June 4 when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre occurred and it yielded photos of the square and military tanks.
Another typed the phrase “China’s best actor” which showed as top search result a book with that name about former Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. The searcher pointed out Baidu, the local search engine, would yield different results.
To go around the firewall, some Chinese use virtual private network (VPN) services which is expensive and slows down browsing speeds.
While by 1:16 a.m., China’s firewall appeared to have discovered the hole and bricked it, but as of Monday afternoon, google.co.kr was still working.
