Washington: New reports suggest the Facebook owned photo-sharing app, Instagram has been blocked in the Chinese mainland.
According to The Verge, China has blocked the app to prevent images of the demonstrations of the pro- democracy protest from reaching the mainland.
The site was one of a scarce few social networks that had avoided the attention of China’s censors, but as photos of the protests flooded the image sharing service under the hashtag #OccupyCentral, it seems the government decided to pull the plug, report said.
Website monitoring services blockedinchina.net and greatfire.org both indicate that mainland China cannot access Instagram.
Instagram, owned by Facebook, had remained one of the few US social networking apps still accessible in a country known for its strict censorship of political topics. But on Sunday, users in China began reporting that the product had been blocked. From Beijing, the app was no longer loading new posts.