SlideShare gets the ‘Great Firewall’ treatment in China

LinkedIn is one of the few major Western social networks not blocked in China. It’s slide-hosting service SlideShare may not be as fortunate.

A screenshot from watch group China Internet Watch’s Facebook page shows that the site is not loading for users trying to access it directly via the web:

It isn’t exactly clear how long the site’s been down or what might have caused it to be blocked, especially considering what LinkedIn managed to do when it was briefly taken down in 2011. At the time, it released a statement explaining the situation:

The government of the People’s Republic of China recently blocked access to our site in China for a short period of time. We cannot assure you that the Chinese government will not block access to one or more of our features and products or our entire site in China for a longer period of time or permanently.

The professional social network was back up less than 24 hours later.

LinkedIn paid just under US$118.5-million for the SlideShare in May, highlighting the nearly 7.4-million presentations hosted by Slide Share embedded across more than 1.4-million unique domains.