Bug or Ban? Weibo Users Report Trouble Registering New International Accounts

After coming across a tip from a user that overseas users might be having trouble registering new Sina Weibo accounts in an earlier article, we decided to do a little investigating. The result? We have no idea what the heck is going on.

We spoke to a number of people as well as attempting our own new account registrations across different countries, ISPs, and browsers, and came up with a lot of different responses. A few folks said they had no trouble registering a new overseas account. Several others said they couldn’t do it at all. Neither my colleague Rick nor I (he’s in Japan, I’m in the US) were able to successfully register a new overseas account even after trying a variety of different email accounts and browsers.

Sorry, you’ve registered too frequently, we suggest you take a break!

Even more oddly, the error messages that we got seemed to vary. Rick got one error message about his email account having too much activity and another “server is too busy” error. I got a different error about having registered too many times despite the fact that I have never tried to register a weibo account on my current ISP and I also tried registering with four different email accounts and across three different browsers.

So what’s going on here. I honestly have no clue, but it’s clear that a decent percentage (though not all) international users are unable to register new Sina Weibo accounts right now. Is this a temporary bug or a concerning new trend? Are you experiencing any issues signing up for a Sina Weibo account? Let us know in the comments.