Microsoft’s Bing search engine down in China, sparking speculation it has been blocked by ‘Great Firewall’
- As of December, Bing held a 2 per cent share of China’s search market compared with 70 per cent for Baidu
Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been unavailable to some mainland Chinese users since late Wednesday, triggering fears that it has become the latest American tech company to be “walled off” from the world’s largest internet population.
Attempts to open cn.bing.com, the company’s mainland-China hosted site, return error messages, though Chinese users can still access Bing’s global site using a virtual private network (VPN) which circumvents China’s “Great Firewall” of censorship.
It is unclear whether Bing has joined the Chinese government’s long list of blocked foreign websites or if its China service is experiencing technical difficulties.
“We’ve confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps,” Microsoft said in a statement on Thursday.
The Financial Times reported on Thursday that Bing has been blocked in China following a government order, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
Bing was blocked in China due to an accidental technical error rather than an attempt at censorship, Bloomberg News reported, citing people it did not identify. The government had no intention to block Bing but it’s unclear when the service will be restored, according to the report.
A spokeswoman from China’s cyberspace authority did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday.
China blocks access to a large number of Western websites, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to restrict its citizens’ access to uncensored information. The last case involving a major Western internet site was in 2017 when Facebook’s WhatsApp message app was blocked. While Microsoft’s rival Google shut down its search engine in China in 2010, Bing has continued to operate in the country.
Bing’s unavailability came just one day after a scholar publicly censured Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine, for flooding first-page search results with its own content platform.
Fang Kecheng, a Chinese media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, even went as far as to proclaim “Baidu is dead as a search engine” in an article posted on his public WeChat account on Tuesday. The article went viral with more than 100,000 views within 24 hours.
"Vast as the Chinese internet is ... there is not even one [qualified] search engine," Fang concluded in his article.
As of December 2018 Bing held a 2 per cent market share in China, far behind Baidu with 70 per cent, according to data from StatCounter, which tracks website visits.
