BEIJING — A technical glitch originating with Google Inc. — not Chinese government censorship — was behind an outage of the search engine in mainland China on Tuesday.

But the public outcry over the interruption underscored the heightened sensitivity of Chinese Internet users who anticipate that Beijing regulators will retaliate against Google in response to the firm’s recent defiant public stand against censorship in China.

China’s powerful filtering system dubbed “the Great Firewall” has blocked other American sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that ran afoul of government watchdogs.

Last week, Google shut down its Chinese-language search engine and redirected users to an uncensored version in Hong Kong.

The retreat ended Google’s four-year experiment operating a Chinese language search engine under Beijing’s restrictive censorship rules.

Soon after Google’s announcement, the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed official at the State Council Information Office calling the decision “totally wrong.”

In a separate incident Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that the Yahoo e-mail accounts belonging to foreign journalists appeared to have been hacked, drawing renewed attention to concerns over Internet security in China that have escalated tensions between the United States and China.