Guess what… Yahoo.com is available again:) Would love to know what the cause was of their unavailability. I’ll keep monitoring to see if things change.
Yesterday China Herald tipped me that the Yahoo.com website (the English version) didn’t resolve. I checked, saw that it was true and thought I would check back the next day if the situation had changed.
At times these things happen here in China and it could have been a technical problem instead of a block. Yahoo! China (cn.yahoo.com) was still working and even search.yahoo.com was doing ok.
This morning I checked again and Yahoo.com is still unavailable. Also search.yahoo.com stopped giving results entirely.
Yahoo! China still resolves, as the Chinese version of Yahoo is owned by Chinese company Alibaba which makes it less likely this version will be affected.
Is Yahoo.com really blocked?
It probably is, at least for now. Not so long ago Flickr was blocked and Typepad and Blogspot were reblocked.
The only reason I can think of that has made the masterminds in China’s blocking center decide this, are Yahoo’s recent statements that “China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet”. In that case a block like this is just a reminder from the authorities to show who is in charge.
It’s annoying, mostly for foreigners living in China as they can’t access their mail. Cn.yahoo.com still works and in that respect will affect the Chinese user less.
The question is now how long Yahoo.com will be punished/blocked. A day, a week or maybe it gets on the special list of websites that are blocked on and off like aforementioned Blogger and Typepad.
The good news is that some others on this special list have been unblocked. Wikipedia has been unblocked again for all languages but Chinese and Technorati is available as well.
The block soap (opera) continues.
