I accidentally typed in a Livejournal URL without feeding it through a web proxy just now, and, miraculously, the page loaded! Livejournal, an easy-to-use blog system popular with non-geeks, was blocked in China in March. It’s still unclear why it was targeted, after all, no known political activists or dissidents had Livejournal pages (maybe it lowered their street cred? It wouldn’t do to have cutesy mood icons on a post demanding democracy, after all) and the service was mainly popular with foreigners.  In any case,  now that it appears to be unblocked, LJ users can log on and read those ‘friends-only’ posts they couldn’t access through a proxy. Get going!

We got in to the office today, logged on to check our Yahoo! Mail and then … nothing! The page wouldn’t load. Imagine our dismay when we quickly attempted to load Yahoo! Chess, only for it to end in failure as well.

Our worst fears were confirmed by a visit to greatfirewallofchina.org which summarily flashed ‘BLOCKED’ on the screen.

A crawl through Google Blogsearch (since Technorati’s been blocked too) revealed this post, published 12 hours ago, also saying that Yahoo.com access had been stopped. A comment on the post says that there’s no access in Shenzhen either.

Let’s keep in mind that a Yahoo service, Flickr, has recently been blocked here.

Has Yahoo.com been deliberately “harmonized” (or purified, as Hu Jintao might say)? Or was it some technical malfunction or human error? We’ll find out in the next few days, I’m sure.

Rebecca Mackinnon and other GFW watchers, where are you? GFW police: Fine, take Yahoo, but leave Google!

Update: Pacific Epoch is feeling similarly frustrated, Shanghaiist weighs in: Upcoming.org, also Yahoo owned, is not accessible.

Update 2: All is well. Yahoo seems to be working fine now.