Microsoft’s Bing Halts Autofill Characteristic in China, Citing Native Legal guidelines

Beginning round Thursday, some China-based customers of Bing discovered they couldn’t open the search engine’s web site, although others may nonetheless use the service.

Bing—the final main overseas search engine working in China after Google pulled its search engine from the nation in 2010—was nonetheless unavailable for some customers on Friday in a minimum of 9 provinces and areas together with Beijing, Guangdong, Hubei, Shanghai and Sichuan, in keeping with checks by The Wall Road Journal.

Bing’s service disruption is the newest headache for Microsoft in China, the place the American expertise juggernaut has been caught in more and more tough conditions this yr as Beijing tightens its management of on-line content material.

The Redmond, Wash., firm and China’s cybersecurity regulator, the Our on-line world Administration of China, didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Earlier this yr, Microsoft customers identified that the corporate was censoring China-related content material on its platforms. In June, Bing customers famous that U.S. searches for the time period “Tank Man”—an iconic image of a person standing solo in the way in which of a column of military tanks after China’s 1989 Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath—on the search engine didn’t return any hits on the anniversary of the occasion. Microsoft mentioned it was an unintentional human error.

Additionally in June, the Journal reported teachers and journalists have been instructed their LinkedIn profiles could be blocked in China as they contained content material thought of problematic by Chinese language legal guidelines. A LinkedIn spokeswoman mentioned on the time that whereas the corporate supported freedom of expression, providing a localized model of LinkedIn in China meant adherence to on-line censorship necessities of the Chinese language authorities.

In October, Microsoft introduced it will be shutting down the social capabilities on its LinkedIn platform in China amid elevated regulatory scrutiny.

China’s web and content material controls, already among the many strictest on this planet, have been tightened this yr forward of an essential political assembly in 2022 anticipated to call present President

Xi Jinping

as China’s chief for a uncommon third time period.

This month, China’s web regulator mentioned it had fined social-media big

Weibo Corp.

and standard content material platform Douban.com tens of millions of {dollars} for content material infractions that it mentioned violated the nation’s legal guidelines and guidelines.

On the

Twitter

-like Weibo platform, Chinese language web customers mentioned they have been confused about whether or not Bing was blocked within the nation. Those that couldn’t entry it lamented the disappearance of the search engine.

Bing, launched in China in 2009, is the third most-popular search engine within the nation, in keeping with information from analytics agency StatCounter.

Baidu Inc.’s

search software is dominant with about 87% of market share as of November 2021. Sogou, a unit of Chinese language tech big

Tencent Holdings Ltd.

, follows with 5% and Bing with 4%, figures by StatCounter present.

In China, Bing’s web site was additionally briefly disrupted in January 2019, when the search portal was inaccessible for a couple of days. Microsoft then mentioned it didn’t know why it occurred.

—Zhao Yueling and Grace Zhu contributed to this text.

Write to Liza Lin at Liza.Lin@wsj.com