China's Firewall Stymies Google; Users Confused 34
eldavojohn writes "Massive confusion occurred last night for Google's Chinese search engine and ad services when Google's automated reporting system claimed that everything was blocked in China. The problem was that most users experienced no outage despite Google's reports and Google has backpedaled on those reports. Google explained that their tool for detecting blockage is not 'real-time': 'Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.' The WSJ blogger notes, 'Beijing may not need to cancel Google's license. Death by a thousand disruptions could be just as effective.'"
Re:This is bad for China. (Score:4, Informative)
You clearly didn't read the links in the summary, which in itself provides little information. There's confusion and inconsistency in Google's .cn sites. Some users, especially in Beijing, have reported outages, and others have not. The bottom line is that some unknown factors or persons are causing performance and uptime problems with Google properties within the China firewall. You can choose to define it as a "hiccup" but that's a bit of a leap at this point. If you have information to share, I'd like to see it.
Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Death by a thousand disruptions could be just as effective
What disruption? The service continued to work fine. It was only the status page that reported it was down, which doesn't actually impact the service.