China has once again blocked access to Dropbox, according to a report by The Next Web.
The country saw a temporary reprieve from the Dropbox block back in February, when Chinese officials decided to end the nearly four-year ban on the cloud storage service. But now it seems the government has changed its mind.
For proof the service is down, censorship monitoring organization GreatFire.org is showing that the downloading function (dropbox.dl) on Dropbox is 100 percent blocked, while the main Dropbox.com web app seems to be blocked as well. GreatFire.org continually tests links to see if and when services become blocked in China and then reports the information to their site.
China has a history of tightly controlling the flow of information on the Internet for fear that its citizens may be exchanging politically sensitive information (or doing things like organizing protests). But the decision to block Dropbox may also come down to competition. China has spent hundreds of millions of yuan on creating a public cloud-computing infrastructure in its main cities.
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But if competition is the issue, why unblock Dropbox in the first place?
In the meantime, Dropbox users in China are taking to Twitter to voice their discontent.
