So much for global domination. Less than two weeks after Facebook targeted the Chinese market, users’ problems with its Chinese-language site point to either serious regional outages or government censorship.
Chinese-Language Facebook
The odds seem to favor that second possibility, given everything Wikipedia, YouTube, and various blogs have experienced. Also, a Facebook spokeswoman told Loretta Chao, “We have not made any changes to our site that would create access problems and are looking into the situation,” and this is Facebook, not Twitter, we’re talking about, so outages are far from ordinary.
Since the Chinese-language version of Facebook is new, it’s possible that an employee missed or broke something, though. Some evidence supports this theory.
Rick Martin writes, “I can verify that it’s not blocked (not all the time anyhow), as I’ve accessed it numerous times in the past few days. But there have been times as well when it’s just not come up at all. . . . A ping of facebook.com from my network utility reflects this ‘iffy’ behavior. Check it out. Thirty percent packet loss . . .”
Or perhaps, in a third scenario, the Chinese government is trying to censor Facebook and is just handling the job badly. Olympic preparations are occupying a lot of its attention, after all.
We’ll see whether the situation sorts itself out within a few days.
