Tech & Biz

Flickr is no longer accessible from China!

by Robert Scales | June 8, 2007 at 08:51 am

2088 views | 10 Recommendations | 7 comments

Copied from Flickr's forum

Since around 12:30pm (Beijing time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.

Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it's not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.

We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven't detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives. Thanks for your patience.

As Stewart stated earlier,

"Unfortuantely, the firewall's administrators don't provide contact details, so we can't just call up someone who makes decisions about which sites are blocked and plead our cases. All we can do at this point is continue to monitor, seek advice from colleagues closer to the region and/or with more experience.

We definitely haven't forgotten about you, but there is not much for us to announce publicly at this point. As soon as anything changes, will let you know. And we're all rooting for you!"

Access to earlier forum topics on this subject now seem inaccessible for some China-based users, so I'm adding this as a locked topic so that we can at least keep you updated.

I'll keep digging for more info, but this is not a good news and it will not help us with our plans to spend some time in China next year for a project using online social networks and web technologies.

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Jordan Yerman

at 08:57 on June 8th, 2007

Robert Scales, thanks for getting this story out so quickly. It will now show up on the home page for four hours. If new developments justify it, I'll renew this flag for another cycle. Let us know of any further developments as soon as possible!

Jordan Yerman

at 13:02 on June 8th, 2007

Thanks for getting this up so quickly, Robert... I'm removing the urgent flag for this story for the time being. If there are any new developments, please let us know.

Rob Walker

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 09:12 on June 8th, 2007

Robert Scales, this is a solid story and definitely requires a closer look. Is this in keeping with China's habit of censoring anything they can't control? Hasn't this happened to flickr before in China?

Robert Scales

at 09:22 on June 8th, 2007

I don't think this happened to Flickr before, but it has happen to other companies..

But flickr has become more popular and the event around tiananmen square happened on June 4th, so every year the authority are more agressive around this time...

For instance instance you cannot access wikipedia from China and most wiki-based sites are not accessible either..

there is a work around Flickr using a firefox extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4286

babblingdweeb

at 12:49 on June 8th, 2007

It happened with the UAE and Flickr before -and that work around was one of many for Flicrkites to get through. It's unfortunate that a country would block internet usage like that...but I suppose every country has some form of censorship.

JTshockley

at 08:35 on June 9th, 2007

That's pretty scary, to think that the internet access of the entire reublic of China can be blocked! it seems a bit senseless to do I mean people can always upload after it's restored.