Google Lockdown Underway?

Google rarely runs smoothly at the best of times in our office, but our friends down at Shanghaiist are reporting that we may now be entering the worst of times. At least, if you discount the existence of alternative search engines, or depend just a little too much on the Internet to get through the day.

The Shanghaiist story (read it in full here) reports that all searches on the www.google.com.hk site (the site you're now redirected to if you type www.google.cn into your browser) result in the dreaded "The connection was reset" message.

A few random searches up here in Beijing suggest everything's fine on www.google.com.hk at the moment, although www.google.com is certainly crashing rapidly under the weight of politically sensitive terms like "potato" and "Brian Clough." Yahoo doesn't seem to have a problem with either term - if you really need proof, see the respective results here and here. We'll see what happens over the next few days, but for now it looks as though Google is still hanging in there in Beijing. Otherwise, let us know ...