What’s Really Happening with China’s Great Firewall

Three popular services that allow users in China to view otherwise-censored content have experienced outages, a sign of increasing government efforts to limit what Chinese users can read on the Internet. The companies, Golden Frog, Astrill and StrongVPN, which provide "Virtual Private Networks," or VPNs, have all publicly acknowledged experiencing problems. The problems seem to affect students and personal users. It does not seem that large businesses have been affected.

Censorship in China isn't limited only to whether Chinese users can access foreign websites. It also dictates what they can and can't say online, especially on websites owned by Chinese companies.