What Is Blocked in China (October 2026): OONI Data

Short answer (checked 6 October 2026): of 35 services we looked up, OONI probes in China could not load 20, loaded 7, gave mixed results for 4, and had too few tests for 4. Google, Gmail, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, X, Reddit, Wikipedia, ChatGPT and Dropbox did not load. Zoom, Booking.com, Airbnb and Uber websites did. These are remote measurements by OONI volunteer probes in China, 1 September to 5 October 2026. We did not test from inside China ourselves.

The table

“Loaded / total tests” is the number of OONI tests where the site loaded normally, out of all tests in the period. Click the numbers to open the raw OONI data for that row. The same table is open data: china-blocks.json.

What did not load, and what is unclear

• Blocked on this data: 20 rows. Several rows have fewer than 10 tests (for example Google 6, WhatsApp 6, Instagram 5, Reddit 5, Wikipedia 5), so the sample is small. The result still matches every related row, but treat it as strong evidence, not proof.
• Mixed results: GitHub (65 of 125 loaded), NordVPN (31 of 101), ProtonVPN (36 of 95) and Mullvad (31 of 93). The answer depends on the network, the day, or both. We cannot tell you which one you will get.
• Too few tests: Facebook (3 tests), Tripadvisor, Holafly and Simbye (no OONI tests in the period). No data is not the same as “works”.
• Loads is narrow. Netflix responded in all 30 tests, but that only means the website answered. It does not show that streaming works. The same is true for Zoom, Uber, Booking.com and Airbnb: we checked the website, not the service.

What this means for travellers

The OONI probes are volunteers on networks inside China, so the table roughly shows what you would see on a normal Chinese connection. We do not know which networks the probes used.

Your phone’s data path can change this. A third-party eSIM comparison site, eSIMDB, says that a travel eSIM from a Hong Kong carrier sends your data out through Hong Kong’s gateway, so the internet sees you as browsing from Hong Kong and the Great Firewall does not apply. It adds that this is common among low-cost China eSIMs and that apps like ChatGPT may still have their own restrictions. A local Chinese SIM is on the Chinese network, so the table applies to it. Simbye, which sells a China eSIM, says on its own page that Google, WhatsApp and Instagram are blocked on local connections in mainland China but not in Hong Kong and Macao, and that its China eSIM runs on China Mobile in mainland China. We have not tested any eSIM from inside China, so we cannot tell you which eSIMs get you past the firewall. Read our eSIM for China guide for what to check, and our VPN for China guide for the one VPN website that loaded in nearly every test.

How we checked

1. Source. The OONI aggregation API at api.ooni.io, filtered to probes in China (probe_cc=CN), test name web_connectivity, 1 September to 5 October 2026. We opened the API ourselves on 6 October 2026. OONI is a non-profit project and its volunteers run the tests. We did not run them.
2. Hostnames. The API counts one hostname at a time. We used the exact hostname shown under each service name. For Booking.com, Airbnb, Uber and ExpressVPN the bare domain had no data, so we used the www hostname. Other hostnames of the same company may behave differently.
3. Counts. OONI sorts each test into loaded (ok), anomaly, confirmed block, or failure. We add anomaly, confirmed and failure into “not loaded”.
4. Our rule for the label. Blocked: at least 5 tests and at least 70% not loaded. Loads: at least 5 tests and at least 90% loaded. Mixed results: anything between. Too few tests: fewer than 5. This rule is ours, not OONI’s.
5. What can go wrong. OONI says an anomaly does not prove censorship and that false positives happen, for example when a site serves different content by country or fails by itself. A failure can also be a problem on the volunteer’s own network. The probes are not spread evenly across China.

Spotted something wrong, or tested from inside China? Email hello@nomadchina.net with the date, city and network. We will check it and credit you if you want.

Use the data

The data is free to use under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: “Nomad China (2026). What is blocked in China: OONI measurements, 1 Sep - 5 Oct 2026. https://nomadchina.net/kb/what-is-blocked-in-china/”. The underlying measurements are by OONI, also CC BY 4.0.

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