China's Great Firewall attacks Google once again, blocks any form of access to Gmail
Gmail users in China are now finding that Google's email service is totally inaccessible in the country. While Gmail's website has been blocked in China since June, along with every other Google service …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gmail's website had been blocked in China since June, but this move closes every remaining route to the service — protocols, apps, and workarounds included. The timing matters because it lands in the middle of an escalating sequence: within days, access was partially restored, then Microsoft's Outlook was hit with a man-in-the-middle attack weeks later, and by late January China moved to block VPN services that users relied on to skirt the censorship system.
First-order effects
- Chinese Gmail users — individuals and any business relying on Google's mail servers — lose their primary foreign email channel overnight, with no in-country alternative offered by Google.
- Google's already-minimal footprint in China shrinks further, leaving its services effectively unreachable rather than partially degraded.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft becomes the next visible target as Outlook is subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack, signaling that the pressure applies to whichever Western provider users migrate toward.
- VPN providers face a direct crackdown as the state moves to close the main consumer workaround, converting an access problem into a tools-and-circumvention market fight.
Third-order effects
- The blocklist approach hardens into standing infrastructure: a decade later, GFWeb's domain-level tracking shows the same mechanism catching newer targets like ChatGPT, while episodes like Bing's temporary block — later attributed to technical error rather than deliberate censorship — show how opaque the system remains even to observers.
- Foreign internet companies are structurally priced out of the Chinese market at the application layer, pushing global platforms toward either exit or heavily localized arrangements.
The trend: China's Great Firewall is expanding from selective service blocks to comprehensive control over foreign communication infrastructure, with VPN crackdowns closing the gap between policy and enforcement.