Microsoft’s Bing search engine has hit a wall in China. “We’ve confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps,” a Microsoft spokesman said. Bing was the last major foreign search engine operating in China after Google pulled out in 2010.
Bing appears to have joined a growing list of global internet platforms that are shut out of China’s huge market, demonstrating that even tech companies that submit to Beijing’s strict internet censorship regime can still run into trouble in the country.
Microsoft’s setback comes as China and the United States are locked in a widening confrontation over technology and access to each other’s markets that experts warn could be the start of an economic cold war. It wasn’t immediately clear why Bing was being blocked.
Chinese users first noticed problems with the search engine late Wednesday, when the phrase “Can’t access Bing” started popping up on social media.”It’s not the first time that we’ve encountered issues like this for Bing in China, these do arise periodically,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said during a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Microsoft, which recently overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company, has encountered problems in China before. The company’s internet video and phone call platform Skype was pulled from Apple and third-party Android app stores in China in November 2017. The Bing blackout comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government seeks to tighten its control of the internet using the vast censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall.
On Wednesday, the same day Bing started to become inaccessible for users, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced that it had closed 733 websites and shut down 9,382 apps in a crackdown on “harmful” information.
