An employee walks past the logo of Google in front of its former headquarters in Beijing
IN PHOTO: An employee walks past the logo of Google in front of its former headquarters, in Beijing June 2, 2011. Hackers who broke into Google's Gmail system had access to some accounts for many months and could have been planning a more serious attack, said the cyber-security expert who first publicly revealed the incident. Picture taken June 2, 2011. Reuters/Jason Lee

Gmail was reportedly blocked in China. Google's email service, which suffered disruptions for months in the country, was apparently blocked by the Great Firewall.

GreatFire.org, which claims to be concerned about China's Internet censorship and brings the latest information on the Great Firewall of China, says that a large number of Gmail accounts were blocked in China on Friday. According to users, the service remains to be down even on Monday. One of the site members says that the Chinese government is trying to "eliminate Google's presence in China" further. The member, who uses a pseudonym, says that China is even trying to weaken Google's market overseas. "Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients," Reuters quotes the member, "Many people outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail."

One of Google's spokespeople, who is based in Singapore, says that there is nothing wrong on the company's end. The Transparency Report of the company showed a heavy drop-off in Gmail traffic China on Friday. According to Dyn Research which is an Internet performance monitoring company, China blocked Gmail services at the IP level while served from Hong Kong, PC World reports. Dyn Vice President of Analytics Earl Zmijewski says that all Gmail users are affected by the block unless they use evasion techniques. According to Zmijewski, the Domain Name System returns only Hong Kong IPs from all of our locations throughout China. DNS translates a domain name into numerical IP addresses that computers require to access the Internet. Zmijewski says in an email that the IP addresses are blocked on backbone routers, so the Hong Kong servers cannot be reached from the mainland.

Zmijewski also says that Gmail servers are based in 20 countries. Since only Hong Kong servers are blocked, Chinese users to get around this block using a non-Hong Kong server with the appropriate IP address or a VPN based in another country. Chinese users have been experiencing heavy disruptions in Google services since June 2014. However, users were still able to access emails via protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP until last week.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@IBTimes.com.au