Instagram appears blocked in China as photos of ‘occupied’ Hong Kong circulate

Access to the popular photo-sharing platform Instagram appeared to have been blocked on the mainland on Sunday after photos of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest circulated widely.

Users in the mainland said they could not access the photo-sharing service owned by Facebook on Sunday.

The Instagram website could not be accessed on servers in Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Yunnan on Monday, according to the Chinese censorship monitoring website greatfirewallofchina.org.

Instagram has not yet replied to a request for comment.

The censorship adds Instagram to a growing list of foreign websites blocked on the mainland. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have been blocked for years. Almost all of Google’s online services have been blocked since June. Japanese messaging service Line and South Korea’s Kakao Talk are also inaccessible.

Earlier this month, Chinese censors appear to have also blocked access to DuckDuckGo, a US-based internet search engine with a focus on user privacy.

Lack of access to Instagram sparked a deluge of angry comments and turned into one of the highest trending topics on Chinese microblogs on Monday, according to Weibo’s own rankings. Conversations on Weibo with the hashtag Instagram could not be accessed on Monday morning. The microblogging service said the conversations are “in the process of being audited”.