China is known for their aptly named Great Firewall which was nicknamed so due to the policies implemented by the country to block websites from being accessed by its citizens.
The country has blocked access to many high ranking websites but it is surprising that this one had escaped all this time through China’s Great Firewall. According to a report by TechCrunch, Pinterest has now been blocked by China’s Great Firewall.
Pinterest is a website that lets you ‘pin’ stuff of interest onto ‘boards’ and has become quite popular worldwide. It boasts of an active user account of over 150 million and it is surprising they have taken long enough to block the service.
According to the report, the Great Firewall usually has glitches but this time round, Pinterest has been blocked in the country for a week now which means it has been deliberately censored from China’s residents.
This is interesting since in 2013, Pinterest was estimated to have around 320,000 users from China when the service had over 70 million users. However, Pinterest clones in China were already available in the country and apparently in 2012, there were about 20 clones.
Pinterest now joins the family of popular online companies that have been denied access by China’s Great Wall. They include the likes of Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Github, Pirate Bay, Vimeo, Gmail and much more. Funny enough, Yahoo has not been banned in China which is an interesting move since it is a search engine.
If you want to see websites that have been blocked in China, check out this tool.
