Google said Monday the Chinese government is interfering with its email services in China, making it difficult for users to gain access to its Gmail program, amid an intensified Internet crackdown following widespread unrest in the Middle East.
Google Inc. said its engineers have determined there are no technical problems with the email service or its main website.
"There is no technical issue on our side; we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail," the company said in a brief statement.
A Google spokesperson said users in China, the world's most populous Internet market, have reported having intermittent problems with the service since the end of January.
Problems include difficulty accessing the home page for Gmail and problems sending emails when logged into the service. The instant messaging function is often not working as well.
Google officials said the blocking appears to be more sophisticated than other problems experienced by users in the past because the disruption is not a complete block.
In addition, a March 11 blog post by Google about security said the company had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." In the posting, Google declined to elaborate on which activists had been targeted or where the attacks had come from.
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