Microsoft Bing is back online in China

Microsoft's Bing could not be accessed in China on Thursday due to an accidental technical error rather than for censorship reasons, according to Bloomberg News sources.

Access to Microsoft's Bing search engine has since been restored in China, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ZDNet. The company did not provide further explanation for why the outage occurred.

Microsoft president Brad Smith told Fox Business on Thursday that its search engine was down. 

"People in China cannot access Bing, this is not the first time it's happened. It happens periodically … we're still waiting to find what this situation is about," he said.

Smith also acknowledged that Microsoft had fewer legal rights in China than in other countries.

"There are certain principles that we think it's important to stand up for," he said. "And we'll go at times into the negotiating room and the negotiations are sometimes pretty darn direct."

With Bing, Microsoft has tried to play by China's censorship rules. For example, the search engine filtered out both English and Chinese language search results of politically-sensitive terms such as "Dalai Lama" and "Tiananmen", according to China-based freedom of speech advocacy blog GreatFire.org.

The temporary block of Microsoft's Bing comes at a time when tensions between the US and China are running high, with the introduction of a bipartisan Bill in the US earlier this month to ban the sale of tech to Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE, and the US stating on Wednesday it's intention to extradite Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.

Both the US and China have already levied tit-fot-tat tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods, and Trump made good on his pledge to escalate the trade war, directing Lighthizer to find another $200 billion worth of products to hit.

Google, Bing's competitor, withdrew from China in 2010 in opposition to its censorship rules after revealing it had been hacked by the government. It has since moved from its policy of opposing censorship, having made plans for a censored version of its search engine -- code-named Dragonfly -- for China.

Following the project being made public, 1,000 Google employees signed a letter in August that called for the search company to abandon its efforts to create the censored Chinese search engine. Another open letter protesting against Dragonfly was sent to Google in November, signed by almost 300 of its employees.

"Providing the Chinese government with ready access to user data, as required by Chinese law, would make Google complicit in oppression and human rights abuses," the November letter created by Google Employees Against Dragonfly states.

The internet is heavily censored in China. In 2017, China shut down over 128,000 so-called harmful websites, at the time, saying that it was part of efforts to maintain "social stability", taking on "vulgar" and pornographic content as well as the unauthorised dissemination of news.

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