Reuters inaccessible from China, reports Reuters

Newswire service Reuters is the latest foreign publication to see its lights flicker in the Middle Kingdom. Earlier today, the company reported that its English and Chinese websites were inaccessible from China, indicating that it might have been blocked by the Great Firewall.

Now, when attempts to access Reuters’ website China without a VPN, the browser returns results consistent with other blocked websites like Facebook.

Reuters says that the possible block is affecting its English-language content as well as its Chinese content.

Greatfire.org, an independent watchdog organization that monitors China’s internet, is declaring Reuters blocked. Greatfire itself recently suffered a DDoS attack that raised its operating costs to US$30,000 a day. The attack came days after The Wall Street Journal published a piece describing the tactics it uses to make blocked websites accessible from China.

It’s not uncommon for China’s censors to fire their weapons during popular protests or controversial media reports. The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg have each seen their webpages go blank after publishing political exposes on the CCP. Reuters hasn’t pushed any work that rivals those pieces recently. But it’s sometimes hard to gauge if China’s censors are pulling their levers for a reason, or at random. Last July, Line, KakaoTalk, OneDrive, and Flickr each saw their services hit the wall in China. While protests in Hong Kong were simmering at the time, Instagram and WhatsApp – the two most obvious targets for a crackdown – remained up and running.