Tencent Resolves Loopholes Leading To WeChat Access Via Google, Bing: Report

Tencent Holdings Ltd's TCEHY WeChat has fixed a glitch that led some of its content to be searchable by external search engines on Oct. 22, raising questions on China's internet sector crackdown, Reuters reports.
Some of WeChat's content, including articles on its public accounts page, was briefly accessible in the last few days on Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL Google and Microsoft Corp's MSFT Bing, but not on China's dominant search engine Baidu Inc BIDU.
"Due to recent technological upgrades, the official accounts' robots protocol had loopholes, which caused the external crawlers to scrape part of the official accounts' content," Tencent stated.
"The loopholes have since been fixed."
China's internet sector was long dominated by a handful of technology giants who historically blocked rivals' links and search crawlers, referred to as walled gardens, leading to a regulatory crackdown.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently ordered companies to stop blocking links that have affected users' experience and damaged consumer rights.
The MIIT has also been studying plans and researching to make WeChat content available on external search engines.
Related Content: Tencent Relaxes Selective Content Access Following Regulatory Crackdown: Bloomberg
Price Action: TCEHY shares were down 0.67% at $64.60 at the close Friday.