Japanese chat app Line appears to be blocked in mainland China

Have Chinese authorities added Japanese chat app Line to its internet blacklist?

Today our colleagues in mainland China fired up Line, where Tech in Asia houses its non-urgent communications, only to find that messages they sent were marked with an exclamation point, indicating some sort of technical error.

That might not mark an immediate cause for concern. Line goes down frequently, not unlike any other social network, and even suffered a major outage two days ago. But what’s really causing us to raise our eyebrows is that Line’s official website has been blocked on the Chinese internet. Here’s what our mainland China-based colleagues see when entering the url for Line’s website in Safari:

Taiwan’s pan-green Liberty Times has also just picked up on the possible clampdown. The island is home to one of Line’s strongest markets outside of Japan, with 17 million registered users on the app.

Early this morning Line issued a statement on Sina Weibo acknowledging technical error and noting that it is working hard to resolve the issue, but no further specifics have been given. Numerous commenters in the post thread claim that China’s so-called Great Firewall has indeed extended over towards the messaging app, and  suggest using a VPN to circumvent the alleged block.

We’ve reached out to our contacts at Line and will update this piece with more details if we hear back.

Japanese chat app Line appears to be blocked in mainland China