After the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, China shut down most domestic microblogging services, including Fanfou, the very first weibo service. Many popular non-China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have since been blocked. Sina Corporation CEO Charles Chao considered this to be an opportunity,[14][15] and on 14 August 2009, Sina launched the tested version of Sina Weibo;[16] basic functions including message, private message, comment and repost were made available that September.