Along with blogspot, technorati, wordpress, wikipedia, BBC, etc. Flickr is the newcomer for the list of sites that are inaccessible in China, unless you use an anonymous proxy server (not applicable for Flickr, the images still refuse to load under an anonymous proxy).

Hindered from posting pictures because of the image blocking, I searched around and found that everyone in China is facing this problem, and is even labelled a hot topic on Flickr.

Since around 12:30pm (Beijing time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.

Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it’s not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.

We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven’t detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives. Thanks for your patience.

As Stewart stated earlier,

“Unfortuantely, the firewall’s administrators don’t provide contact details, so we can’t just call up someone who makes decisions about which sites are blocked and plead our cases. All we can do at this point is continue to monitor, seek advice from colleagues closer to the region and/or with more experience.

We definitely haven’t forgotten about you, but there is not much for us to announce publicly at this point. As soon as anything changes, will let you know. And we’re all rooting for you!”

Access to earlier forum topics on this subject now seem inaccessible for some China-based users, so I’m adding this as a locked topic so that we can at least keep you updated.

Then, after surfing around even more, I found a way to tackle this problem! Bypass the flickr.com filter in Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, and other banned places with Access Flickr! Only works with Firefox.