Microsoft’s Bing search engine resumes service in China

Microsoft's Bing search engine is now accessible in China again after experiencing a disruption in service.

Microsoft is still trying to figure out why its Bing search engine temporarily went offline in China, the company's president said following speculation that it could have been blocked by censors.

The US firm's Chinese website, cn.bing.com, was accessible again late Thursday, one day after it suddenly went offline, temporarily taking away the most prominent foreign search engine in China.

Attempts to access Bing had resulted in an error message for users starting late Wednesday, as the most prominent foreign search engine available in China experienced a temporary blackout.

The internet outage raised fears among social media users that Bing was the latest foreign website to be blocked by censors.

Bing complied with Beijing's censorship rules by excluding foreign websites that are blocked by Chinese filters from search results. But President Xi Jinping's government has steadily tightened control over online activity.

Chinese internet users who lost access to Bing set off grumbling about the ruling Communist Party's increasingly tight censorship earlier today.

China has by far the biggest population of internet users, with some 800 million people online, according to government data.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has promoted the notion of 'internet sovereignty,' or the right of Beijing and other governments to dictate what their publics can do and see online.

Chinese filters block access to global social media including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Officials argue such services operating beyond their control pose a threat to national security.

Xi's government also has tightened controls on the use of virtual private network technology that can evade its filters.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google unit operated a search engine in China until 2010 that excluded blocked sites from results. The company closed that after hacking attacks aimed at stealing Google's source code and breaking into email accounts were traced to China.

That has helped Chinese competitors such as search engine Baidu.com to flourish. B