Microsoft confirmed on Thursday that Bing is “currently inaccessible” in China and said it was trying to figure out what was going on.
Bing is the last major foreign search engine operating in China after Google pulled out in 2010, but it accounts for only 2% of the market.
US tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have been largely blocked from the Chinese internet for years, but Microsoft has been able to operate a local version of Bing after agreeing to censor search results.
The blocking set off grumbling about the ruling Communist Party’s increasingly tight online censorship.
Comments left on internet bulletin boards accused regulators of choking off access to information. Others complained they were forced to use Chinese search engines they say deliver poor results.
Bing complied with government censorship rules by excluding foreign websites that are blocked by Chinese filters from search results. But the government has steadily tightened control over online activity.
It was not immediately clear why Bing was taken down. Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, said it’s not the first time the company has encountered this kind of issue.
“These do arise periodically,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “But we’re not aware of any ongoing negotiation or disagreement so we’re working to understand it better.”
Microsoft’s setback comes as China and the United States are locked in a widening confrontation over technology and access to each other’s markets that experts warn could be the start of an economic cold war.
