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Microsoft Says Bing is Restored in China (venturebeat.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stranger-things dept.

Roughly a day after users in China began complaining that they were unable to access Bing, stoking fear that perhaps Microsoft's search engine is joining the long list of services that will not be permitted by the local government, Microsoft says it has fixed the situation. From a report: Bing is accessible in China again. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We can confirm that Bing was inaccessible in China, but service is now restored." Microsoft did not offer an explanation for Bing's outage, but in a televised interview with Fox News at the World Economic Forum, company president Brad Smith addressed the matter. He noted that this is not the first time Bing has faced an outage in China. "It happens periodically."

He added, "You know, we operate in China pursuant to some global principles that's called the Global Network Initiative in terms of how we manage censorship demands and the like. There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government, and we're still waiting to find out what this situation is about."

9 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Darth Li says to Nadella... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  2. Phew! by pi_rules · · Score: 2

    I'm sure that's a huge relief for both users.

    1. Re:Phew! by Sprite_tm · · Score: 1

      FWIW, Bing is actually used more than you think in China. Not because it's good, but because domestic solutions (Baidu) are crap for anything not in Mandarin, and all the other search engines (Google, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, ...) are blocked.

    2. Re:Phew! by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Google is blocked? Despite the fact that they are only too happy to work w/ Chinese universities, which are all Government controlled, on AI projects, even while SJWs within the company protested at their participation in Project Maven? Seriously, that company ought to be sent over to Beijing, along w/ all their SJW employees

  3. They probably repurposed EU Office365 servers... by ffkom · · Score: 1

    ... to make this possible: Microsoft Office365 outage hits users across Europe.

  4. Upgrades Complete by lionchild · · Score: 1

    Great Firewall Upgrades have now been completed, we can restore services once more. ;-)

    --
    Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
  5. Fun fact: one of the tones of the word Bing by melted · · Score: 1

    Fun fact: one of the tones of the word Bing means "disease" in Chinese. Proof: https://translate.google.com/#...

  6. "Global Network Initiative" by aberglas · · Score: 1

    A nice euphansim.

  7. Re:Simple enough by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I know China has the world's biggest market for these things, but I certainly blame companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple et al for being willing to operate in China. Reminds me of IBM willing to deal w/ the Nazis during World War II

    And outside China, they are only too happy to go along w/ censorship demands of the EU or other regimes worldwide, and in the US, where there are no demands from the government, they are only to happy to go along w/ SJWs, and allow the harassment of people like the Covington school kids by celebrities and journalists

    I'm rooting for a new generation of companies to come up and put the above 'tech' companies out of business. Gone are the days when they'd come up w/ good things, be it Windows 7, Android (which is fine by now, doesn't need AI to spy on us). Now it's just 'services' used to spy on us