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Vietnam Internet Users Fear Facebook Blackout
Ben Stocking
November 17, 2009
HANOI, Vietnam – Vietnam’s growing legions of Facebook users fear that the country’s communist government might be blocking the popular social networking Web site, which has become difficult to access over the past few weeks.
Facebook has more than 1 million users in Vietnam, and the number has been growing quickly since the company recently added a Vietnamese language version of the site.
Over the last week, access to Facebook has been intermittent in the country, whose government tightly controls the flow of information. The severity of the problem appears to depend on which Internet service provider a customer uses.
Access to other popular Web sites appears to be uninterrupted in Vietnam, a nation of 86 million with 22 million Internet users.
Government officials and managers at several of Vietnam’s state-controlled Internet service providers did not respond to a request for comment.
But technicians at two of Vietnam’s largest Internet service providers said they had been swamped with calls from customers complaining they could not access Facebook during the last week.
A technician at Vietnam Data Corp. said government officials had ordered his firm to block access to Facebook and that VDC instituted a block on the site Nov. 11. He declined to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
However, Vu Hoang Lien, the firm’s top executive, said he was unaware of any such order.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
Word of the access problems has not yet filtered back to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, said Debbie Frost, a company spokeswoman.
“We would be very disappointed if users in any country were to have difficulties accessing Facebook,” she said.
Most Facebook users in Vietnam utilize the site to communicate with friends and family, and to expand their social network, sharing photos, Internet links and blogs.
Earlier this year, Vietnam’s government tightened restrictions on blogging, banning political discussion and restricting postings to personal matters. Police have arrested several bloggers for writing about politically sensitive subjects.
It appears that Vietnam might be following in the footsteps of China, its massive northern neighbor, with whom it shares a similar economic and political system. China has blocked Facebook since July and has also shut down Twitter and YouTube.
