On late Thursday, it was widely believed that several of Google services were blocked in China after the official Google Mainland China service availability monitoring page indicated a full or partial blockage on some of the services. Many Chinese users took it upon themselves to report on Twitter that the services were in fact available and working normally in the country.
Now, Google has confirmed that its services were not blocked at all. Google states that the Mainland China service availability dashboard is not updated in real-time. The monitoring page was in fact erroneously showing the status from the previous night, in which some of the services were temporarily blocked for a small period of time.
The Mountain View-based company released the following statement:
“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.”
There you have it, folks. We hope that panic didn’t get the best of you.