Google+ Made Unavailable In China: REPORT

China Chokes Access To Google+

Google+, the search giant's social network, has already been made unavailable in China.

According to Great Firewall of China, a China-based service that checks the availability of sites within the country, Google+ has been made inaccessible just a day after its debut. Sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare are already blocked in the country, which has a famously restrictive censorship policy over its Internet.

However, China hasn't completely prevented its citizens from accessing the site. According to Penn-Olson, China is not blocking the site, but is throttling the speed of the site so greatly that it may as well be unavailable.

"Web throttling is a tactic new to China’s Great Firewall, and has been seriously slowing pretty much all overseas internet speeds all year," Penn-Olson explains. "Gmail particularly has been horribly throttled, to the point were it can take five or ten minutes or more to go from the login page to your inbox. It’s a very underhanded tactic [...] [that is] actually rendering it [the service] nearly useless to its users."

Outside of China, demand for Google+ has been so great that the service's invite system was temporarily put on hold Wednesday night.

To learn more about the Google+ project, check out our slideshow of 9 things you need to know about the new social network.

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