BEIJING — Yahoo e-mail accounts belonging to foreign journalists appeared to have been hacked, and Google’s Chinese search engine was intermittently blocked Tuesday, the latest troubles in China’s heavily censored Internet market.
The Yahoo accounts of at least three journalists and an analyst became inaccessible over the past few weeks. They were greeted with messages saying, “We’ve detected an issue with your account” and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related.
Sensitivity about Internet security has run high since Google Inc. announced in January it might leave China after a series of cyberattacks and complaints about censorship. Last week, Google made a partial retreat, shutting down its mainland-based search engine and redirecting queries to the freer territory of Hong Kong.
Analysts have been watching to see if China retaliates for Google’s exit from the mainland search-engine market.
Many redirected queries appeared blocked Tuesday on the Hong Kong-based search engine. Although searches for benign terms were met with results on Chinese competitors such as and Soso , an error page would pop up when the same terms were typed into .hk.
