U.S. ally and major oil-producer Saudi Arabia blocked access to Blogger.com this week, according to Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), which claims that Google's blog-hosting service has been blocked since 3 October, dotJournalism reports. Though users can read blogs hosted by Blogger, they can't log in to update blogs or create new ones. The Saudi Internet Services Unit (ISU) confirmed the report but would not give an explanation.

"Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the internet," said an RSF spokesperson. Tens of thousands of political, religious and sexually oriented sites are blacklisted in the kingdom, according to RSF.