New York Times’ block in India seems to have been lifted. The news site became inaccessible on some networks in India yesterday, including Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea and ACT Fibernet. However, the American news app as well as the website seem to be working fine now on the aforementioned Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The issue surfaced when a tweet suggested that the site was not accessible on Vodafone Idea and Jio. A similar issue was seen with privacy-focussed search engine DuckDuckGo, when it became inaccessible throughout the country. However, as of Saturday, access to the site was restored.
Gadgets 360 was able to independently verify today that The New York Times can be accessed on Vodafone Idea, Jio and ACT Fibernet, along with other ISPs such as Airtel broadband and Jio Fiber where the site was running smoothly earlier as well.
The issue was highlighted by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) with a tweet on Sunday. The tweet read, “Please check if http://nytimes.com and NYTimes app are working on your connection. A user has reported that it is not working in Jio 4G and Vodafone 4G in Delhi.” Several users commented in the thread that they were facing a similar issue in other cities as well, including Bangalore, Patna and Shillong.
This is not the first time that users faced issues while accessing The New York Times in India. A Reddit post suggests that a similar outage was seen in several cities earlier this year as well.
While the site and app appear to work fine now, no official communication has been made from The New York Times, Jio, Vodafone Idea or ACT Fibernet when Gadgets 360 reached out to them.
The New York Times inaccessibility cropped up just days after search engine DuckDuckGo reportedly faced outage issues throughout the country as telcos such as Airtel and Jio blocked access. Some operators cited that the site was blocked due to instructions from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). The government hasn’t released any public statements yet.
However, DuckDuckGo tweeted on Saturday that its services has been “broadly restored.” The private browser also offered a fix which suggested that switching to a third-party DNS provided solves the issues.
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