Earlier this week, Chinese authorities banned popular microblogging web site Twitter and Microsoft's Hotmail web mail service in the lead up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Commemorations are illegal on mainland China but are often held in Hong Kong. The Tiananmen Square massacre -- for which an official death toll has never been given -- saw the Chinese military crackdown on protests by students and workers.
Twitter users flooded chat rooms following the ban, and one Beijing IT expert said: "The whole Twitter community in China has been exploding with it. It's just part of life here. If anything surprises me, it's that it took them so long."
