Mountain View, California — Ever since shutting its Internet search engine in China, Google Inc., on Sunday updated a page that has been monitoring the status of many of its services, reported that a number of unspecified services, including its mobile phone services, are being partially-blocked in mainland China, but it was unknown whether the trouble was related to the company’s impasse over Beijing’s censorship rules.
The services offered to wireless phones were functioning as usual until becoming partly shut, Google said on its website set up that monitors the status of its services in mainland China showed that the US Internet giant’s Mobile offering last week joined Groups, Picasa and Docs as listed as “partially blocked”.
“We can substantiate that our status page indicates that Mobile services are partially blocked from within mainland China,” a Google spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.
“Service accessibility became unstable regularly, and it is too early to guess if this blockage will be persistent,” Google said in an e-mailed statement. “There is no specific evidence that the change is related to our recent announcement.”
Google is keeping close tabs on its various services in China after a stalemate with authorities that compelled the company to redirect users of its Chinese search engine to its Hong Kong site. And, according to the site, other services in addition to mobile that are being blocked or partially-blocked includes search, blog, map, photo-sharing and YouTube services for smartphones and other Internet-based handsets.
Google in January promised to discontinue censoring results in mainland China after hackers stole data and targeted e-mail accounts of human-rights activists.
The exact nature of the block was not clear from Google’s status page, but mobile is the first service in China to have been blocked both directly to Google’s consumer services, and to organizations using Google services, the company said.
Google’s Web, images and news-search services are functioning with “no issues” whereas the video-sharing website YouTube and Blogger service for people to voice ideas, musings or observations online were completely blocked, according to the online “Mainland China service availability” list.
The Mountain View, California-based company has said that despite its public challenge to China’s censorship rules that it would no longer offer its mobile applications on Android phones in China “until further notice”. Chinese companies can still sell phones that use Android, an operating system backed by Google.
“One of the better-case scenarios is that people in China are able to access our uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong,” Google director of government relations and public policy Alan Davidson said during Congressional testimony last week. “A bad-case scenario is that that service is blocked outright.”
China currently caters to around 384 million Internet users, although it has more than 750 million mobile subscribers, many of whom access web content via their handsets.
Google began offering service in China since 2006 at google.cn, which censored every politically-volatile results. All search services in China are required to follow strict censorship rules.
Share of Google fell 80 cents to $561.89 at 2:50 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares had dropped 9.2 percent this year before today.