Microsoft confirms 'Bing is currently inaccessible in China'

Bada bing, bada banned. China has blocked Bing, Microsoft's search engine, tonight.

Bing.com is not accessible inside China, per reports throughout the country.

Microsoft says weve confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps.

The FT's @YuanfenYang reports that Bing was blocked throughout China following a government order. She cites two sources familiar with the matter.

This kind of DNS corruption is usually the very literal way in which the Chinese govt tells foreign tech companies to 'go home', tweeted Yuan Yang.

This kind of DNS corruption is usually the very literal way in which the Chinese govt tells foreign tech companies to "go home" https://t.co/CPQyO8vmkD

— Yuan Yang (@YuanfenYang) January 23, 2019

From her report in the Financial Times:

On Wednesday, mainland Chinese users wrote on social media that their attempts to access Bings China site,cn.bing.com, were failing.Cn.bing.com is still accessible from outside of China. Microsoft said that it was investigating the situation.

Two sources familiar with the government order confirmed that Bing had been blocked. One of the sources explained that China Unicom, one of Chinas major state-owned telecoms companies, had confirmed the government had ordered a block on Bing.

Attempts to accesscn.bing.com resulted in a connection error. The connection error was caused by an inability for the Chinese nameservers address books that match up website names to their digital locations to correctly retrieve the IP address of Bings China platform. This form of nameserver corruption has been often used by the Chinese government to block platforms.