China blocking Windows Phone Marketplace downloads?

It's hard for us as United States residents to really feel just how frustrating of an experience the international support (or lack thereof) for Windows Phone is, but in this case we think we get it. WPSauce reports that many users in China, including themselves, have been unable to properly access the Marketplace for the last three days or so. Here's what their investigation has yielded so far:

In the past 3 days or so, most Chinese WP7 users in my circle (myself included) had this problem: the Marketplace tile shows a certain number of apps could be updated, but when we click update, the progress bar stays "pending" like forever, then suddenly surge to 100%, and ends up "attention required" fail right away. The ISPs or carriers we had this problem on include: - Beijing Unicom home ADSL - Beijing Unicom 3G - Shanghai Telecom ADSL - Shanghai Unicom 3G - China Mobile Fujian division 2G (worked briefly an hour ago and now as dead as a brick again) - Zhejiang Unicom

Plus they go on to say that app purchases are failing as well, but not before charging your card or phone bill. Even worse? Apparently China's "Great Firewall" is the main culprit behind all of this, after they discovered a router using an American VPN (a technique where the router thinks it is receiving USA internet service) has been working perfectly this entire time. With Windows Phone set to expand Chinese input and display languages with Mango, this could prove to be a troublesome obstacle if Microsoft can't find a way around this for its users.

Via: Engadget
Source: WPSauce