Google Inc.'s search sites in China abruptly stopped working Tuesday, but the explanation for the outage changed as the day wore on. The Internet giant first blamed itself, citing a technical change, but later reversed course and pointed to the heavy hand of China's "Great Firewall"—even as service appeared to be back to normal. The evolving explanation whipsawed Google watchers and showed how fraught with confusion the relationship between China and Google remains. The episode risks escalating their battle a week after Google stopped censoring its search engine in China.
Google struggled to discern the cause of the massive disruption, in which users in China received error messages for Google searches on the company's Hong Kong-based search site, Google.com.hk, and—at least for many users—on Google.com. Google began routing Chinese Internet users to its Hong Kong site last week as it said it would no longer comply with China's censoring policies and wouldn't run a censored Chinese search engine. The company said at midday Eastern time Tuesday that it believed it had caused the problem unintentionally by adding some text to the Web addresses of its search results, triggering the censoring.
Later in the day, Google reversed itself, saying it had made those changes a week earlier. "So whatever happened [Tuesday] to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the Great Firewall," the company said. Google said late Tuesday afternoon that its search traffic in China had returned to normal. "For the time being this issue seems to be resolved," it said. The incident added to the sense of confusion over Google's relations with China. Google said Monday that its mobile services in China were being partially blocked, but it wasn't clear how extensive that blockage was, nor that the Chinese government was definitely behind it.
The disruption Tuesday was broader. Users of the Hong Kong site from at least half a dozen Chinese cities said they could reach the search page, but that any term entered in the search window yielded a browser error message, often causing their access to Google to be severed temporarily. Users in some cities also said they couldn't access Google.cn, which since last week has automatically sent users to the Hong Kong site.
Many Chinese users reported that all Web searches—even of terms as innocuous as "happy" or "tree"—on Google's Hong Kong site produced an error message saying the page couldn't be opened. The disruption was similar to how analysts expected a crackdown by China's Internet censors would look. It also shed light on the role of China's censorship regime in filtering results for China-based Web users. The system is opaque and unpredictable, and officials almost never discuss its workings. Wang Lijian, spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, one of China's main Internet regulators, said he was unaware of any Google disruption.
Any permanent blockage of Google's searches by China would deal a sharp blow to the company's hopes of continuing to operate part of its business in the country after dismantling its censored Chinese site. Google said last week that it hoped to maintain its music search and maps services in China, along with sales and research-and-development operations. Beijing has expressed anger at Google for publicly flouting its censorship regime, and a decision to block access to Google entirely has always been considered possible. Many analysts have believed Beijing would stop short of that for fear of infuriating Google's tens of millions of regular Chinese users, not to mention foreign businesses that require access to information.
Because Google censored its old Chinese site, Google.cn, in accordance with government rules, that site wasn't filtered by the government's firewall. Its international sites, such as the Hong Kong one, have always been subjected to filtering, meaning that Chinese users' searches of some sensitive terms—like those related to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests, the initials RFA, for Radio Free Asia, or even the names of top leaders—might trigger an error message from the browser instead of a results page.
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