China erects Great Firewall around news of ethnic riots

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 02:09

Business IT - Security

To keep news of the riots from spreading, the Chinese government turned off the Internet, not only in Xinjiang but elsewhere.

According to Reuters , residents of Urumqi were told the Internet might be unavailable for the next two days.

And the official websites of the local Urumqi and Xinjiang governments were down.

Elsewhere, users in Beijing and Shanghai said Twitter was blocked; domestic social network Fanfou was up, but searches for terms like "Urumqi" and "Uighur" didn't return any results.

Even so, news is getting out, as Internet and mobile phone users found ways around the restrictions.

Early Twitter posts were shared worldwide, while other information was reposted to sites outside China that the government could not block.
The site drop.io/urumuqi, for example, is a repository for both official and unofficial news about the events.