Facebook Blocked!

Facebook, my bridge to friends and relatives across the world, the bastion of communication between old classmates and acquaintances, the time waster that reduces my productivity at work, is now blocked in China...kind of.

It started with some suspiciously long loading times over the past few days, followed by intermittent bouts of unavailability, followed by periods of easy access and now, at least over the past 20 hours, it's been completely blocked.

It started with a couple of blog posts on Sunday, such as here and here, and now there's reports on cnet Asia regarding the issue.

Facebook responded to a post by the Wall Street Journal on July 1 with the following: “We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in China are having difficulty getting access to Facebook. We have not made any changes to our site that would create access problems and are looking into the situation.” Lame! Damn those communists for ruining our fun!

I'm guessing (and hoping) that this is a temporary blockage caused by the Party's massive censorship endeavor as they test a sophisticated Facebook censorship machine that can quickly and efficiently block selective areas of the site, or the entire network, at a moments notice in preparation of the upcoming Olympics. It's only been two days, so it's too early to tell how permanent this block will be. The Chinese government doesn't release any official word on what sites are blocked and which ones aren't. When trying to access a blocked site, the page just comes up as "the page you requested is unavailable,” sometimes this is coupled with the entirety of one's internet access shutdown inexplicably for two minutes.