Noting a bigger-than-typical plunge in the traffic to its websites in China, Google said its services including search engine, Gmail and Maps were blocked in the country Friday night and into Saturday. The block is largely attributed to the 18th Communist Party Congress, an extremely secretive political meeting during which a once-a-decade transition of power takes place.
According to Google's Transparency Report, which provides information about traffic worldwide, there was a steep drop in traffic in China starting early Friday. However, the website said its services do not appear to be completely blocked throughout the country. "We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end," Google said in a statement.
Problems related to access of Google services is not unprecedented in China as the latest case only marks just another incident ever since the Internet giant stopped self-censoring its Chinese Web-search engine in 2010.
According to GreatFire, a website that monitors Internet activity and access in China, many Google subdomains on Friday were "DNS poisoned." GreatFire, which calls itself "the great firewall of China" said attempts to access Google.com were being redirected to a non-functioning IP address in Korea.
Google shares rose 1.7 percent to $663.03 at the close in New York yesterday. The shares are up 2.7 percent this year.
