This weekend, China's strict content and Internet laws may have claimed another service before it was even officially supported. The New York Times reports that Apple has disabled its new Apple News app in the region.

Although China is Apple's second-largest market in terms of revenue, Apple News is currently only available in the US (it's also being tested in the UK and Australia). However, the Times notes phones registered in the US can still largely utilize Apple News when traveling. But when in China, users are now being met with a blank Apple News feed and an error message: "Can't refresh right now. News isn't supported in your current region."

The NYT points to a Reddit thread from Larry Salibra, founder of Pay4Bug, bemoaning such errors even when pre-downloading Apple News content on a device. "They’re censoring news content that I downloaded and stored on my device purchased in the USA, before I even enter China just because my phone happens to connect to a Chinese signal floating over the border," Salibra wrote. “On device censorship is much different than having your server blocked by the Great Firewall or not enabling a feature for customers with certain country iTunes account."

Apple declined to comment on the NYT piece, but they would not be the first US tech giant to remove select services from the Chinese market. Google pretty much left China in 2010 when it stopped censoring search results and started redirecting Chinese IP addresses to the Hong Kong Google site. While the company still tries to offer its services in China, the government blocks most Google services. (Accordingly, Google services aren't very popular.)

In fact, online monitoring is so pervasive in China that it has led to the decline of what was once a vibrant and powerful digital community on China's own version of Twitter, the microblog service Weibo. Web blocks are routinely used as part of the famous Great Firewall of China censorship system, and authorities have even used local shutdowns. After ethnic riots in the Western province of Xinjiang in 2009, for example, the Internet there was cut off completely for several months.