Civil Liberties

With Communist Conference Over, China Restores Google Access

We return you now to your regularly scheduled surfing

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Google, Gmail, and other Google services seem to be accessible again in China this morning, according to a report, after an outage that coincided with the start of the once-a-decade meeting to appoint a new Communist government.

Access to the services returned after 6 a.m. local time, after an approximately 12-hour outage, according to IDC News Service, which cited Google's Transparency Report, along with confirmation from GreatFire.org, a group that monitors Internet censorship in China.

Early yesterday, California time, data provided by Google's Transparency Report showed a sharp drop off in traffic to Google's Web sites—to roughly half the normal amount. Google sent CNET a statement in the late morning saying, "We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end."