Great Firewall of China website shows users are unable to access any location within google.com

This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

Google's new social network service, Google+, has apparently been blocked in China within a day of being launched.

The company also halted new signups after a torrid first 24 hours in which "insane" demand to join it forced the company to close it to new members briefly.

According to the site Great Firewall of China, which uses a server based in China to try to access external web locations, Google users inside China are unable to access any location within google.com, which includes the URL for Google+, at plus.google.com.

Another access-checking service, Just Ping, also reports that the plus.google.com URL is inaccessible within China.

The blocking by the Chinese government, using its "great firewall" – a censorship system which blocks a huge number of websites outside the Chinese borders on the basis that they contain "destabilising" content such as pornography or unsuitable views – matches that applied to other western social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. By contrast, the Guardian's site is accessible in many parts of China.)

Google's main URL, google.com, has been blocked inside China since the company decided to withdraw from the mainland in 2010 in protest at what it saw as government-inspired hacking.

According to the Great Firewall site, its Chinese version, google.cn, is also blocked while that of China-sanctioned Baidu is not.

Google+ is being seen as Google's answer to Facebook, which boasts almost 700m users – although it is effectively banned inside China, where only people who use encrypted connections to the outside world are able to join it.

Vic Gundotra, one of the company's top engineers who watched the development closely, posted on Google+ early on Thursday morning (at roughly 8.45pm on Wednesday night in Google's Pacific timezone) that "we've shut down the invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you for all of your interest!"

Invites were opened up again on Thursday afternoon, though only on a limited basis.

There are no details yet on how many people have joined the service.

China's government on Friday celebrates an important anniversary, of 90 years since the founding of the Communist party of China, and it has instituted a number of crackdowns on internet use and heightened censorship.

Earlier this week Google revealed that it receives a steady stream of requests for private data from developed countries — but that it had had no content removal requests from the Chinese government in the second half of 2010. However it received 90 requests from China-controlled Hong Kong for user data, an increase of 80% from the same period in 2009; it acquiesced to 53 of them, a 59% compliance rate.