Microsoft is waiting to find out why Bing is offline in China

Microsoft is still trying to understand why its search engine Bing is temporarily offline in China, said the president of the company, which was reportedly blocked by censorship.

The Chinese firm's Chinese website, cn.bing.com, was back online late Thursday, a day after it was taken offline, temporarily taking away China's most prominent foreign search engine.

This disruption caused social media users to fear that it was the last foreign website blocked by China. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have long been blocked by authorities using a censorship device called "Great Firewall".

"This is not the first time this has happened, it happens periodically," Microsoft President Brad Smith told Fox Business News at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government, and we are still waiting to know what this situation is about," he said. .

The temporary disruption of Bing was a surprise, as the search engine followed China's censorship rules.

On Friday, for example, a Bing search on Liu Xiaobo, a dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer while he was still in custody last year, returned a message: "The results are deleted in response to a notice of local law. "

Smith said that it was understood that Bing did not have the same legal freedoms in China as those he enjoyed in other countries.

"But at the same time, we stick to our weapons, we think it is important to defend certain principles, and sometimes we go into the negotiating room and the negotiations are sometimes rather direct", he said. he declares. .

While rival Google closed its search engine in China in 2010 after arguments over censorship and hacking, Bing continued to operate in the country, alongside Skype, a company owned by Microsoft.

Bing, however, is struggling to catch up with the Chinese search engine Baidu, which dominates the market, although many people in the country complain about the quality of the search results.

Smith said Microsoft has taken its censorship obligations to customers seriously.

"I think what is interesting today, it's technology and some kind of human rights, freedom of expression, these issues really overlap and sometimes meet more than in the past, "he said.

"We turned down offers on technologies such as facial recognition technology because we thought people's rights would be compromised."

"And I think more than ever, tech companies really have to think about these things, they have to be principled and you have to have some moral courage, in my opinion, if you want to be in this area care of your customers. "