Last night it was not blocked. This morning the Ministry of Culture and Information has it blocked.
Is there anything juicy about Saudi Arabia on the front page just about now?
I just checked… saw no Saudi News.
There is this bombshell of a story, though: “Julianne Hough And Brooks Laich Get Married In Idaho Ceremony”. Perhaps that’s what’s causing the block. 
ETA: Deutsche Welle is currently running a story that doesn’t have a lot of good to say about SA.
I just checked it for you, too. There is a story about Ashton Kutcher dissing some tabloid something or another. Could that be the issue? I’ll link to it, even though you probably won’t be able to see it.
I’ll look for the story from another source.
There’s a slideshow on the HuffPo front page of women around the world protesting: some bare-breasted, some bare-assed. Could be it.
It might be a temporary block. There might be something upsetting the Proper Authorities just now. It might be a permanent block. Al Jazeera is now blocked forever it seems. Has been for a couple of weeks.
Good solid Tory government.
Dude, VPN’s
I am surprised though. You would know better about how the Saudis act regularly, however the times I have used the Saudi net, they did not seem to bother about the kind of stories that have been mentioned by other posters*.More concerned about direct political opposition.
*I am not getting those stories when I go to HuffPo, I am seeing something about wildfires in California and about Donald Trump and and Russia.
Is it advisable to use VPN’s in such a country?
They block those websites for a reason.
Maybe related to this?
Which is?
I didn’t mean to condone censorship but I’m sure they have their reasons.
I was just asking if it is smart to go around the state’s blockades.
Lots of people use VPN’s. I have never bothered. The Huffington Post is still down.
Seems like it would be blocked quite frequently.
I am surprised at them blocking the venerable old HuffPo, or that any native Saudis would bother to read it. It’s not that much different to blocking The Weekly World News.
Well, yeah, because oppressive autocracies are evil, even when you live in them and agree to abide by their rules. China, 2011 to 2016. No VPN, no internet.
And if they catch you doing it, there could be torture, prison, or murder ahead for you. Hence, the maybe not smart part.
I frankly doubt they care too much about someone using a VPN to access a blocked website.
Don’t be silly. Using a VPN isn’t on the same level as trying to overthrow the CCP. They don’t even try to catch up with you. ISP’s simply sniff for the traffic and then block those IP’s, or otherwise interfere with that traffic. Hence, the consequence of using a VPN is a small economic penalty of paying for a new VPN again.
I hear China has travelling execution vans, a cross between TV detector vans and a troupe of assassins. who park in front, detect what one is watching online, and then they swarm in and kill you all.
In [ Insert Foreign Nation of choice ], they torture old people and children for reading celebrity gossip.
As for Dread Vlad, saying anything critical immediately gets Russians 15 years in the Gulag.
That is why Russians are such quiet, timid people, never uttering a peep.
Or downloading one of thousands of proxy extension.
I suspect Governmenst will give up on this as a bad job in about 5 years.
Okay, maybe simply reading the wrong site might not lead to dire consequences–but posting to it sure as hell can.
Need more examples? Because those aren’t fluke events.