Bing lock in China called a technical mistake

Numerous Chinese users on social networks report that Bing is again available in the country, reports Bloomberg.

Yesterday, a Financial Times correspondent wrotethat the search engine was blocked in China by order of the government. This kind of “blocking” by changing DNS records can be considered a warning: “This type of violation of DNS records [referral to 127.0.0.1] is usually a very literal way that the Chinese government tells foreign technology companies to“ go home, ”Yuan Yang wrote. At the same time, access to Bing could be obtained directly by IP-address, that is, in this case, deep packet inspection or other serious blocking methods were not used, as is the case with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other sites banned in China.

Two FT sources have confirmed that Bing is blocked by government order. One source explained that the blocking order came in China Unicom, one of China's largest state-owned telecommunications companies. But it turned out to be a false alarm: after about a day, access was restored.

Bing is not very widely used in China, the market share is only 2%, but this is one of the few remaining portals to the “wide Internet”, because the government is systematically isolating the Chinese Network from the rest of the world, NY Times writes.. Bing survived in part because Microsoft followed the practice of censoring political topics. She also collaborated with the government in developing other areas of her business, such as working with a state-owned company that supplies military products to produce a government-approved version of Windows 10.

“There are times when there is disagreement, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government and we’re still figuring out what this situation is all about, ” saidBrad Smith, president of Microsoft, in an interview with Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He also acknowledged that Microsoft in China is less legally protected than in other countries: “There are certain principles that, in our opinion, it is important to uphold,” he said, “and we will negotiate from time to time, and sometimes these negotiations are damn straight. ” Probably Brad Smith means that the authorities put forward direct specific requirements.

Microsoft continues to investigate the incident.