One blogger in Hong Kong pronounced Wednesday night that “China’s net censors have hit a new low” when for nearly 14 hours, the search site Yahoo! appeared to be blocked in mainland China. All reports out of China early Thursday led web users to believe that Yahoo! had suffered the same fate as Wikipedia, BBC News, Blogspot and so many other sites in China. And although Yahoo! seems like almost too big of a site for China to take down, in light of the net censors’ disabling of Yahoo!’s photo site Flickr two weeks ago, the blocking of Yahoo! seemed plausible. While China’s version of Yahoo!, Yahoo.cn, was unaffected during the overnight outage, CNET’s Little Red Blog reported that service on the U.S. Yahoo.com, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo Korea, Yahoo France, and Yahoo Thailand were unavailable from a mainland connection. Then at around 11am Thursday morning in Shanghai, service to all Yahoo! sites was back to normal. So what happened? Some have hypothesized that someone tripped over the Yahoo! wire down at net nanny headquarters. With the Flickr block and the recent blocking of all Typepad blogs, a case of technical difficulties seems almost too much of a coincidence. Furthermore, Yahoo! and the Chinese government have been at odds of late, over a scandal in which Yahoo! gave information to the Chinese government that led to the imprisonment of a prominent Chinese journalist. Yahoo! stated on June 11th that the company “is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.” Most likely this is a case of China showing Yahoo! who’s boss and letting them know that if they step out of line again, China will rip that silly exclamation point off the end of their name and use it to metaphorically bitch slap the whole company.

•Little Red Blog: Another One Bites the Dust

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