Facebook has more than 1 million users in Vietnam, and the number has been growing quickly since the company recently added a Vietnamese language version of the site.

Over the past week, access to Facebook has been intermittent in the country, whose government tightly controls the flow of information.

The severity of the problem appears to depend on which internet service provider a customer uses.

Access to other popular websites appears to be uninterrupted in Vietnam, a nation of 86 million with 22 million internet users.

Government officials and managers at several of Vietnam's state-controlled internet service providers did not respond to a request for comment.

But technicians at two of Vietnam's largest internet service providers said they had been swamped with calls from customers complaining they could not access Facebook during the last week.

A technician at Vietnam Data Corp. said government officials had ordered his firm to block access to Facebook and that VDC instituted a block on the site on November 11. He declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

However, Vu Hoang Lien, the firm's top executive, said he was unaware of any such order.

Word of the access problems has not yet filtered back to Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, said Debbie Frost, a company spokeswoman.

The Press Association - November 17, 2009