Microsoft’s OneDrive and Yahoo’s Flickr not reachable in China [UPDATED]

There’s more alleged turbulence on the Chinese internet this week, as it appears that Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service and Yahoo’s Flickr photo hosting site are currently not accessible from the mainland.

News of the failed connectivity first came to our attention from GreatFire.org, the anonymous watchdog that keeps tabs on China’s online censorship activity. Tech in Asia then ran its own unscientific tests and reached out to other residents in the mainland, and found that  both sites remained inaccessible.

Here’s what we see when we try to reach Flickr from China:

And OneDrive:

We’ve reached out to our contacts at Microsoft to get their take on these developments and will update this piece when we hear back.

[UPDATE: 4 July 11:40 AM] Microsoft issued the following statement to Tech in Asia: “We are investigating reports that customers of OneDrive are experiencing access issues in China. We have nothing more to share at this time.”

Is this a genuine block? A temporary closure? Or simply a hiccup on the ever-unreliable Chinese internet? The jury’s out for now. Still, now is prime time to watch out for irregularities in China’s cyberspace. Hong Kong residents are currently staging massive demonstrations against the local government, out of concern that the universal suffrage it was promised for 2017 won’t ever come to fruition due to pressures from Beijing. State media outlets in the mainland have already taken efforts to harmonize the demonstrations, with the English-language China Daily going so far as to describe the protests as an annual march that’s “a jolly good thing.”