Bing lock in China called a technical error

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

Yesterday the Financial Times correspondent wrotethat the search engine was blocked in China by order of the government. Such a “blocking” by changing DNS records can be considered a warning: “This type of DNS record violation [referral to 127.0.0.1] is usually a very literal way that the Chinese government tells foreign technology companies to go home,” wrote Yuan Yang. 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 methods of blocking were not used, as is the case with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other sites banned in China.

Two FT sources confirmed that Bing is blocked by government order. One source explained that the blocking order was received by China Unicom, one of the largest public telecommunications companies in China. But it turned out to be a false alarm: about a day later, access was restored.

Bing is not very widely used in China, the market share is only 2%, but it is one of the few remaining portals to the “wide Internet”, since the government systematically isolates the Chinese Network from the rest of the world, writes NY Times. 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 activities, such as cooperation with a state-owned company that supplies military products to the government-approved version of Windows 10.

“There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government and we are still figuring out what this situation is about, ” saidBrad Smith, President of Microsoft, in an interview with the Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He also admitted that Microsoft in China is less legally protected than in other countries: “There are certain principles that we think are important to defend,” 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 demands.

Microsoft continues to investigate the incident.