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Yahoo!'s Hong Kong office reported that it has not served any images to mainland China since last week and confirmed that this was not down to a technical problem. It believes the Chinese authorities took action after photos of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the site.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said that the company had not had any notification from China, whose Ministry of Information could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the US capital Washington later suggested that the authorities were trying to protect children from 'racy' images.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield said that the problem was being regularly monitored.

'We hope that this is a temporary issue, and we currently believe that it will be,' he said. 'In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives.'