Google mobile services blocked in China

Declines to rule out deliberate intervention.

Google's mobile services in China have been partially blocked for the past two days, according to the company's service accessibility report.

The affected services are believed to include Google Maps, Sync and Gmail.

It is currently unclear whether mobile services other than Google's have been affected, or whether the search firm has been targeted after moving its China search service to Hong Kong. The blocking could also be an unintentional temporary glitch.

A Google spokesman would verify only the status of the services, and declined to give any more details.

"We can confirm that our status page indicates that Google Mobile services are partially blocked from within mainland China," he said.

The company stopped censoring its services on Google.cn this month and began redirecting visitors to Google.com.hk because it considered the country's censorship demands to be unreasonable.

Google.com.hk delivers uncensored search in simplified Chinese, although Google said last week that it had already experienced intermittent censorship on the Hong Kong site.

The move followed months of failed negotiations between Google and the Chinese government over the issue of censorship.

Relations between Google and China began to deteriorate when Chinese hackers were said to have compromised Gmail accounts belonging to human rights campaigners, as well as around 30 other web firms' customer accounts.