Google confirms YouTube blocked in China

Google officially confirmed today that YouTube has been blocked in China, from a steep drop in traffic on the evening of March 23 to “near zero” by March 24.

Since March 23, 146 reports of YouTube's inaccessibility have streamed into the Herdict website. These reports appear to confirm a national blackout of YouTube, which was unavailable in locales as geographically distant as the educational CERNET network, China Netcom (CNC Group) in Beijing, Shanxi, and Heilongjiang, and China Netcom’s provincial networks in Shanghai, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guangdong. Herdict users reported across a variety of access points—from school, work, and home.

Herdict also captured 137 accounts of a previous reported block of Youtube beginning on March 4, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the crackdown on protests in Tibetan regions as well as the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising of 1959.