China is seemingly obstructing Google’s Gmail service in the most recent move by the nation to control foreign Internet services.
Dyn Research, Internet performance monitoring firm, said that China was blocking Gmail in the IP level when served from Hong Kong.

All Gmail traffic to China is influenced by the block and through Hong Kong, unless users set up evasion techniques, wrote Dyn’s vice president of analytics, Earl Zmijewski, in an e-mail.

Google’s real time measure of traffic patterns for its services also signaled a sudden fall after Christmas in Gmail traffic in China. “We have assessed and there is nothing wrong on our end,” Google said via e-mail.

IP address is usually used by regimes to censor content to a specific area.

“DNS returns simply Hong Kong IPs from our places throughout China,” Zmijewski wrote.

Zmijewski pointed out that Gmail servers in 20 different states operate when doing a spot check, and he is able to get them from China. “So, using a non-Hong Kong server ( in case you chance in order to find the correct IP address) or a VPN based in a different state, should empower Chinese users to avoid this block,” he added.

China has an extensive history of interrupting and censoring websites which could be utilized for broadcasting anti-government content and has blocked some international services like Twitter and Facebook. The business began redirecting users seeing its Chinese search site to its Hong Kong web site.

On other newsgroups and Twitter, users complained about the dearth of accessibility to Gmail. Liu Yuan, a user in Shanghai, wrote: “email from or to gmail from china could be returned. btw, that is the greatest vpn?”