Reuters reports that Google is entirely blocked in China today, with only a very small percentage of users able to access the web service. As a result, Google shares have plummeted by 1.4 percent, and Baidu, China's largest search engine operator has seen a 3.5 percent increase.
According to Google's mainland China service page, Web Search, Suggest, Images, Youtube, Sites, Ads, Blogger, Picasa and Mobile are completely unavailable. In addition, Images, News, Docs and Groups are only "partially blocked" with between 10-66 percent of users unable to access the services. As of writing, the only service which isn't blocked is Gmail.
Google announced earlier this year that it would no longer censor results in China, after the attacks on the company were traced back to the Chinese government. The company was automatically redirecting all searches on Google.cn to Google in Hong Kong, where searches are allowed to be performed freely. The search giant came under fire for the move from the Chinese government, and was threatened to have their license revoked last month, so changed their homepage to show a mocked up version of Google, which when clicked, sent the user to Hong Kong again.
The move seemingly pleased the Chinese government earlier this month when they were re-granted their Internet Provider license, but this latest move could hurt negotiations further. Reuters tried to contact Google, but a spokesperson said that no information was immediately available.
Update: Google says this was just a status related error, and that all services should be behaving normally:
"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. Please also note that the dashboard is not a real time tool."
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