Google now blames China for search engine outage
March 30, 2010 | 2:17 pm
Google is now blaming government censorship for a temporary outage of
its search engine in mainland China.
Google initially attributed Tuesday's outage to a technical glitch, a
string of text "gs_rfai" that began appearing in Web addresses in the
last 24 hours. Because of the characters "rfa," Chinese filtering
systems associated the searches with Radio Free Asia, which is
inaccessible in China, the Internet search giant concluded. Google did
not say how the string of text was created. Chinese Internet users
speculated Tuesday that the addition of the characters triggered the
error messages.
But, after an investigation, Google on Tuesday blamed the outage on
China's Internet filtering system.
"It's clear we actually added this parameter a week ago. So whatever
happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a
change in the Great Firewall," a Google spokesman said. "Our search
traffic in China is now back to normal even though we have not made
any changes at our end. We will continue to monitor what is going on,
but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved."
-- Jessica Guynn
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