Access to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine Blocked in India

[Bapun]

India has cut off access to the Internet Archive, a San-Francisco-based website that hosts the popular Wayback Machine service. Its a twenty-year old digital archive of the world’s publicly accessible web pages.

Users who tried reaching the archiving service last night encountered an error message: “Your requested URL has been blocked as per directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India” – a notice that has been used in the past when high courts across India ordered the blocking of a particular webpage.

The Wayback Machine has over the last decade become a useful tool to get around media and government censorship as it allows users to view archived or deleted web pages. Authoritarian countries often seek to remove contentious online content or rapidly change existing webpages, which is when internet users turn to the Wayback Machine for help.

Access to Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine Blocked

 

[Bapun]

Loads fine here though!

 

[sumitroy]

working fine here

 

[Sarkar]

No issue here also.

 

[sumitroy]

The incident was first reported by MediaNama and there has been no response from the Indian government as to why such a step was taken. Vodafone and Reliance Jio subscribers are still able to access Internet Archive.
The non-profit organisation is already aware of the situation and has reached out to DoT and MeitY to get a response on the matter. However, there is none yet while they wait to see full access being restored to web.archive.org.

Internet Archive Suddenly Blocked in India; No One Knows Why

 

[Bapun]

Still opens here without any problems.

 

[DTH Fan]

http version won't open. https will open.

 

[Bapun]

http version won't open. https will open.

Yeah. You're right.

 

[sumitroy]

http version won't open. https will open.

its working here http version

 

[Bapun]

its working here http version

http://archive.org/ works?

Doesn't for me, throughs an error: 404 Not Found