Sina Weibo the domestic microblogging services including the first weibo service Fanfou. Many popular non-China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have been blocked from viewing since then. Sina's CEO Charles Chao considered this to be an opportunity. SINA Corporation launched the tested version of Sina Weibo on 14 August 2009. Basic functions including message, private message, comment and re-post were made possible in September 2009. A Sina Weibo–compatible API platform for developing third-party applications was launched on 28 July 2010. On 1 December 2010, the website experienced an outage, which administrators later said was due to the increasing numbers of
Sina Weibo users and posts. Registered users surpassed 100 million before March 2011. Since 23 March 2011, t.cn has been used as Sina Weibo's official URL shortening domain name in lieu of sinaurl.cn. On 7 April 2011, weibo.com replaced t.sina.com.cn as the new domain used by the website. Meanwhile, the official logo was also updated. In June 2011, Sina announced an English-language version of Sina Weibo would be developed and launched, where the contents would still be controlled by China's laws. On January 11, 2013, Weibo (a subsidiary of SINA Corporation) and Alibaba China (a subsidiary of Alibaba Group) signed a strategic