Dan Levin

The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives’ homes so they can get online for classes the next day. Millions of American students are grappling with these challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on.

Trapped between the financial hardships of the pandemic and the technological hurdles of online learning, the millions of low-income college students across America face mounting obstacles in their quests for higher education.

After wildfires consumed an entire town, students and teachers who had planned for remote classes found some comfort in staying connected amid the chaos.

The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989.

In addition to Google’s search engines being blocked, the company’s products, including Gmail, Calendar and Translate, have been affected.

“This is by far the biggest attack on Google that’s ever taken place in China,” said a co-founder of GreatFire.org, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by the authorities. “Probably the only thing comparable is when the Chinese government first started blocking websites in the 1990s.”

While Internet users in mainland China could reach international versions of Google search until a few days ago, “all Google services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China,” GreatFire.org wrote. These include the Chinese-language version based in Hong Kong, Google.hk, and Google.com, Google Australia and others. Unlike the websites of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and The New York Times, which are reliably blocked by the authorities, Google services are being disrupted in a way that affects about 9 out of 10 Chinese users, according to GreatFire.org.

By allowing some access, “the Chinese government is trying to pin the blame on Google,” the GreatFire co-founder said. Google says that it is not the problem. “We’ve checked extensively, and there are no technical problems on our side,” said a Google spokeswoman, who declined to elaborate. Google’s traffic from China on all its services just fell 50 percent, according to the company’s transparency report.