Yahoo: Outrageous! The Authorities Are Banning Us!

Last week, an interesting rumor spread on the Internet sustaining that Yahoo's Flickr was banned by the Chinese authorities but no reason for that was offered. At that time, the Sunnyvale company's officials refused to offer more details about the unavailability of the service, saying only that it wasn't a technical problem from their servers. Today, after approximately one week since it was reported, Flickr is still blocked. However, the Yahoo officials decided to offer some more details and explain the unavailability of the online photo sharing product.

"It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end," a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said according to Reuters. "It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them," she added.

The Chinese authorities refused to comment on the speculations, leaving the Sunnyvale company alone in the fight with the rumors and the angry users. "We are currently investigating this issue and hope that it is only a temporary one," the representative also mentioned.

Flickr is an online photo sharing service that allows users to upload and share their images with other Internet users. Today, the giant portal Yahoo started the migration of the Yahoo Photos users, the service that will be closed on September 20, to Flickr, the product that will host all the images uploaded on the old web-based solution.

It's not something new for the Chinese authorities to restrict the access to a certain web-based product because the country's government is very strict about the online content available to most of the residents. In the past, several solutions were blocked by the largest country's ISPs but, in most cases, the officials provided a reason for the ban.