It looks like Github has gotten caught up in the great firewall of China — a development flagged first by Hacker News at about 1:40 a.m. PT Monday morning.
The Hacker News item pointed readers to DNC lookup information posted early Monday that the popular project hosting and code sharing site was unavailable to users in Beijing, Shenzen and other Chinese localities.
Poor Chinese Developers, #GitHub is blocked in China! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700—
Vianney Lecroart (@acemtp) January 21, 2013
San Francisco-based Github is the most popular project hosting and code sharing site — last week it said it passed the 3-million user mark. It is not alone when it comes to companies that run afoul of Chinese censorship. Youtube, Facebook and news sites have been blocked and last year Chinese users were unable to download a new version of Node.js because it its version number was the same number as the date of the Tiananmen Square uprising.
As many on Twitter commented this morning and as GigaOM has reported before, these roadblocks not only hinder the flow of news and information for citizens, they hurt the ability of Chinese developers to compete worldwide.
Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user matt512
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