Was Bing blocked by China's 'Great Firewall'?

By Meng Jing, Sarah Dai

Microsoft's Bing search engine has been unavailable to some mainland Chinese users since late Wednesday, triggering fears that it has become the latest American tech company to be “walled off” from the world's largest internet population.

Attempts to open cn.bing.com, the company's mainland-China hosted site, return error messages, though Chinese users can still access Bing's global site using a virtual private network (VPN) which circumvents China's “Great Firewall” of censorship.

It is unclear whether Bing has joined the Chinese government's long list of blocked foreign websites or if its China service is experiencing technical difficulties.

“We've confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps,” Microsoft said in a statement on Thursday.

The?Financial Times reported on Thursday that Bing has been blocked in China following a government order, citing two sources familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman from China's cyberspace authority did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday.

China blocks access to a large number of Western websites, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to restrict its citizens' access to uncensored information. The last case involving a major Western internet site was in 2017 when Facebook's WhatsApp message app was blocked. While Microsoft's rival Google shut down its search engine in China in 2010, Bing has continued to operate in the country.

Bing's unavailability came just one day after a scholar publicly censured Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine, for flooding first-page search results with its own content platform.