Google mobile services back up in China

Google's mobile services are back up and running in China after being partially blocked following its move to servers in Hong Kong.

The search firm's status report for its services in mainland China was updated yesterday to show that its mobile services are back in action or subject only to minor blocking.

"This assessment may not reflect small-scale blocking that frequently occurs, or individual experiences with issues such as keyword blocking that may affect access to services temporarily," Google said.

The report shows that six out of 12 Google services in China are still fully or partially blocked. The only other service change affected Picasa, which went from partially to fully blocked on Sunday.

Google said originally that its services in China were being blocked by government-operated firewalls after the company moved its .cn searches to Hong Kong to avoid censorship in mainland China.

Google then claimed that the block was the result of an unintentional 'parameter error', then backtracked again.

"Having looked into this issue in more detail, it's clear we actually added this parameter a week ago. So whatever happened to block google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall," the firm said at the time.