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 in October 2012. On 4 June 2013, Sina Weibo had blocked the terms "Today", "Tonight", "June 4", and "Big Yellow Duck". If these were searched, a message would appear stating that according to relevant laws, statutes and policies, the results of the search couldn't be shown. The censorship occurred because of a photoshopped version of Tank Man, which swapped all tanks with the sculpture Rubber Duck, had been circulating around Twitter. According to BBC news report, Weibo users drop-off since 2014 can be attributed to both government crackdown that Chinese government regulations on preventing the use of aliases to create