Photo sharing app Instagram is down in China as pro-democracy protests ravage Hong Kong.

The Facebook-owned app is now inaccessible to the Chinese people, according to website's monitoring page. Instagram has been blocked in China, which is also censoring reports of the worsening pro-democracy crisis reported by other mass media.

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China's sudden censorship of the Hong Kong protests appears to have been triggered by the posting of pictures and videos on social media sites, including Instagram, of the massive demonstrations by demonstrators and their supporters.

Appalling to many Hong Kongers are photos and videos showing Hong Kong police using tear gas to try to disperse the demonstrators.

CNET's Carrie Mihalcik said the photo-sharing site has not yet responded to requests for confirmation it has been blocked by the communist government in China.

A number of photos posted with the hashtag "OccupyHK" or "#OccupyCentral." on Sunday with the phrase "Occupy Central" was blocked on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to social networking service Twitter, according to Reuters.

Although Facebook, Instagram's parent company, has been blocked in China for years, it appears the photo-sharing service is the most recent victim of the online censorship rampant in communist China.

Chinese officials blocked DuckDuckGo, a privacy focused search engine, earlier in the month. In June, a number of Google's services were inaccessible as the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre came close.

Meanwhile, the inventor of the World Wide Web has called for a bill of rights to safeguard the Internet's independence from corporations and governments and guarantee Internet users' privacy.

"If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life," said Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the London "Web We Want" festival on the future of the internet.

"If a government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power," he added. "Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies."

TagsInstagram, censorship, pro-democracy, Hong Kong pro-democracy, protests, occupy central, Occupy Central movement, occupy wall street, DuckDuckGo, Tiananmen Square, Tiananmen Square Massacre, Tiananmen Square Anniversary, Internet censorship, Tim Berners-Lee