As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square fast approaches, China’s great firewall has tightened its grip on Google. Censorship watchdog GreatFire.org is reporting that the Chinese government has begun targeting Google and Gmail making them completely inaccessible for users in China over the past week.

The group added that the last time this block was in effect was in 2012 and only lasted 12 hours. This time around however the block is going on seven days (and counting).

The advocacy group stated, “It is not clear that the block is a temporary measure around the anniversary or a permanent block. But because the block has lasted for four days, it’s more likely that Google will be severely disrupted and barely usable from now on.”

When asked recently about the disruptions, a Google spokesman said: “We’ve checked extensively and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

Google’s own transparency report suggests otherwise and shows detailed stats about global traffic with lower levels of activity from China starting from about Friday, which could indicate a serious amount of disruption.

Google began to encrypt search results in China by default sometime in March this year by redirecting all users to the encrypted version of Google automatically. Prior to the Tiananmen anniversary the Great Firewall of China began to block Google search access by disrupting TCP connections to Google, effectively blocking all services encrypted or not. This new block now includes Google search, images, translate, gmail, Google Hong Kong (China’s version of Google) and any other country specific Google page. Even chrome’s default landing page has not escaped this block.

While there are several methods Google can employ to bypass this censorship they are currently choosing not too.

How to unblock Google in China

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