guess people could try going straight to zh-cn.facebook.com to see if they are still blocked; presumably if what this dude is saying is true, there should be no redirection problems there.

让发死布克来得更猛烈些吧。
让校内诸同盟安心的死亡或是被收购吧。

works

I'm not in China now, so I don't know about this issue, but when I was at Soochow University a couple weeks ago, I had problems getting Facebook to load. Apparently the redirects were screwing it up, so I'd have to go to login.facebook.com. This sounds similar to the problem (and solution) suggested here.

I can't access it in Beijing without a proxy. According to websitepulse.com, it seems unable to connect to facebook from Shanghai.

It's fine here, today.

Is it just my connection, or is everyone having a hard time getting North American URLs to load today? Reminds me of the great undersea cable catastrophe of Dec/06! The horror...

I've been accessing (or trying to access) Facebook via this URL:
http://www.facebook.com/
-- not from some alternate, Chinese site.

In the on-again, off-again, I now (2:15pm Thursday, July 3) find it off again (though it was back on for me for several hours this morning).

The Mountain View opinion was interesting, but seems to lack convincing support, so far.

cheers from Beijing,
d.i.

ps bearsito --

I'm not having trouble with US websites loading in Beijing (e.g., nytimes.com is just fine, slate.com is fine), with sometime exception of facebook.com.

When this was announced via Danwei, I decided to check it out. All I can ascertain is that using a proxy works fine. I used to have problems accessing FB via active links to FB inside China, (unless I typed the URL).

In my opinion, whatever the reason, it's pretty lame of a government or a service provider to not announce a disruption of service, but then again, I was thinking of closing my account, I don't really use it anyway.

issue was sporadic, i had problems at two different occasions yesterday but it appears to be back to normal today.

facebook has a solid technical team with skills, there is no reason they would screw up on a simple redirect.

the chinese government is clearly worried about foreign multinationals mapping the social networks of their young and upwardly mobile classes, and rightly so. facebook is the most ridiculously obvious intelligence gathering tool in the history of the internet, and people willingly throw information about themselves and their friends up there daily.

fools.

facebook is going to block itself by taking this action...

When you posted the first story it was working fine here in Shenzhen, it was working fine last night too, but after I woke up today it stopped working, seems to be blocked.

ah, first TOR now facebook ... what next?

这里没问题

Now it works fine in Beijing again

If it was ever blocked, it's probably un-blocked now because of articles like this.

Since yesterday afternoon, I'm again unable to access Facebook from Beijing (whether using the www.facebook.com or the zh-cn.facebook.com address).

Maybe they just want to block your access to facebook David :)

I not saying this as a joke. I live in the UK. For the last month or so I've been redirected to the Chinese Facebook address every time I've typed in 'Facebook.com'.

even the chinese version is being blocked... What the hell is going on cant get into any news sites?

I still experience some connection problems with facebook, but not as often as earlyer. I got 2 recommendations for those breathing in paperbags because of this:

1. Buy a VPN, which gives you an American IP. So long China Firewall!

2. Check out www.weliveinbeijing.com, a social community we've launched for student, expats and locals in Beijing :-)