Glitch Erroneously Indicates Google Service Blocked in China

Just when things were settling down, Google’s operations in China seemed under threat again. For a time yesterday, Google’s availability tool indicated that much of its services, except Gmail, were either partially or fully blocked. This lead to a lot of reports claiming that Google had been blocked again in the country, despite some indications from users there that this was not the case.

The situation was cleared when Google explained that some issues with the way it determines availability made the dashboard erroneously indicate that the sites were inaccessible.

“Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally. Please also note that the dashboard is not a real time tool,” Google said in a statement.

At one point and for several hours yesterday, the Google dashboard that indicates the availability of various Google services in China showed that most had been blocked in the country. It showed that the search engine and advertising network were completely blocked Google Image Search and Google News were only partially blocked, which Google says is anywhere between 10 percent to 66 percent un-availability.

However, the way Google determines availability is prone to temporary glitches. The tool is not real time and is usually updated just one time a day. In this particular case, what was only a small block was interpreted as a bigger issue by the system and was reported as such.

Users in China, however, were quick to point out that Google services were working as expected, leading to some confusion. After several news reports of the outage, Google investigated the matter and found the glitch. The status has now returned to normal with most of the services available. Google Search, news, ads and Gmail work properly. YouTube, Picasa and Blogger are currently blocked in China and have been so for quite a while.