i didn't rtfa, but this is nothing new, i've been in shanghai since 2007, afaik, google services (including gmail) have been hard to access, it was really after eric schmidt put the assault on china by making things public (circa 2010) that things started to get to really bad. from memory, 50% of the time, google services (search, gmail, apis, compute engine, office apps, etc) would not work back in 2007, in 2010 probably 80% of access would fail, and recently in the past year and a half, it's been almost 99% to now 100%.<p>i've already started a backup strategy long ago (about 8 months ago) as the frustration was just started to drive me crazy, I migrated all my services to either local equivalents or microsoft (outlook.com), but there's only a matter of time before those perhaps also get blocked.<p>of similar relation, ever since the snowden leaks, it seems that china has started looking to ban or outright limit foreign technology services used by the china government which is basically almost like everything, the nickname is qu ioe, qu which stands for out/oust, ioe stands for ibm, oracle, and emc.<p>note that vpn still seems to work, and if you're traveling on a roaming mobile service, you can still access google services (and others like facebook, twitter, youtube), but if you're plugging into the hotel wifi without vpn, good f'ing luck. note that i also work at a foreign national software company in china, the office can access these services uninhibited since we have an mpls to the main office in the valley.<p>if you're living in china and dependent on foreign services/apis like google then it's really hard because you must have vpn or some equivalent. i suggest even using a jumpbox.