The website of English language Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post has been blocked in China today as the paper ramps up its coverage of the Occupy Central protests in the city.

The decreased availability of the site was revealed on firewall testing site Greatfire.org and tweeted by one of the newspaper’s journalists, James Griffiths, earlier today.

Griffiths tweeted: “A testament to the whole team’s fantastic reporting since Occupy Central kicked off, SCMP now blocked in China.”

At the time of publishing, every one of the news stories on SCMP.com’s homepage was about Occupy Central. The only two non Occupy Central-related articles prominent on the site are on SCMP.com’s newly launched native advertising platform, SCMP Brand Post.

The news emerges on the second day of the pro-democracy protests, which have been the subject of international media curiosity from the first day and grew in prominence after police fired tear gas at demonstrators on Sunday night.

SCMP.com, the Post’s website, has lowered its paywall to give its readers free access to its coverage of Occupy Central.

However, since it has done so, the site has repeatedly crashed. The paper has yet to respond to Mumbrella’s questions about why the site has been down.

SCMP.com’s managing editor Sarah Graham told Mumbrella on Sunday that the cause of the outage is being investigated. She added that one of the stories about the protests has received the most traffic for any article the site has published in 2014.

Popular picture sharing website Instagram has also reportedly been blocked in China over the last few days, as has Yahoo, according to Bloomberg.