Barely a day after the Duckduckgo ban and reversal by Indian ISPs, it was the turn of the New York Times to face a sudden outage as both its app and the website went off the web for users in India. However, things were fixed over the past two days and the block appears to have now been completely lifted.
When contacted, senior officials in the Department of Telecommunications in New Delhi denied that there was any ban at which point we tried reaching out to some of the ISPs, who told us that the issue had been fixed. However, we did not get any clarity from the representatives of two of these ISPs on what exactly was the issue.
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The NYT app as well as the website of New York Times went off the radar sometime on Sunday when it was brought to the notice through a tweet by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a non-governmental organization that conducts advocacy on digital rights and liberties.
Please check if https://t.co/F4gSj8jy8t 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. File your report here. https://t.co/FhUHzXSjbeJuly 5, 2020
Immediately after the tweet, several users came up and complained that they were not able to reach the website or the app via Vodafone-Idea, ACT Fibernet and Reliance Jio. The complaints came from various cities including Bangalore, New Delhi, Chennai and even some parts of the Northeast.
However, some time during the latter half of the day today, things returned to normal all across the country, the officials said, confirming that both the website and the app were available via all the above mentioned ISPs and across all regions of India.
A similar issue came to the fore when the privacy-focussed search engine DuckDuckGo went off the air for some time and was inaccessible pretty much across the whole of India. However, things returned to normal on Saturday and the website was restored though in this case, the federal officials said it was a communication error that caused it.
However, in the case of the New York Times, this isn't the first time that the website has faced such issues as earlier this year, a Reddit post had claimed a similar outage across some cities though things were normalised very quickly then.
