Bing restored in China after being inaccessible

Microsoft in a statement said “ We can confirm that Bing was inaccessible in China, but service is now restored”. The outage caused concern that the service might have been blocked by the Chinese authorities, in the same way the firewall that blocks  Facebook and Twitter. Chinese authorities have also cracked down on Virtual Private Networks, which allow users to skirt around the firewall. China based messaging services and social media are restricted, with key words and expressions blocked if they express dissent or ridicule senior political leaders. Bing has only a small market share among search engines in China, where locally-grown Baidu dominates the market.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been blocked in China, following the retreat of Google’s search engine in 2010 and Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app in 2017.

China prevents access to a variety of websites to restrict citizen’s access to information  using a system of censorship controls known as the “ great firewall”.

China’s Unicom, a major state-owned telecoms company, had received an order from the government to block Bing for “ illegal content”.

“As US-China tensions are increasing, China’s reliance on state control of telecoms companies to enforce blocks show the limits to the country ever opening up for foreign players “ according an independent consultancy firm in China.

Microsoft’ software and its operating system Windows is widely used in China, following decades of engagement with Beijing, and the company even developed a special edition of Windows for Chinese government use and even opened this month a research and development centre in Shanghai. The cn.bing.com site is still accessible from outside China although attempts to access the site in China is failing but some Chinese users were still able to connect, caused by the inability of the Chinese nameservers  address books that match up website names to their digital locations to accurately retrieve the IP address of Bing’s China platform.

Bing enjoyed a niche market for English language searches as the only remaining major English search engine in China.