Update: Our ISPs do us proud with their transparency (not).
Still no word from Airtel on the issue. Still trying to get a statement/explanation from them on what happened.
— Kawaljit Singh Bedi (@kawaljit) November 8, 2014
Update: This kind of an error page has appeared before. See this.
Update: http://ndtv.com on Airtel and MTNL now redirects to http://www.ndtv.com. While this solves the issue for users trying to access NDTVs website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a block doesn’t still exist for http://ndtv.com.
Update: Airtel informs us that they’ve not blocked any of the NDTV domains.
People are still trying to figure this out, so we’ll update when we have more.
Yesterday: NDTV.com appears to have been blocked in India. We just got an anonymous tip-off about this, and upon logging on to the site, I got a blank page with the message that said:
“The page you have requested has been blocked, because the URL is banned.
URL = ndtv.com/”
This doesn’t look like a glitch, since the page specifically mentions that NDTV.com has been blocked. Importantly, www.ndtv.com works, but just ndtv.com doesn’t.
A screenshot:
This was via MTNL Delhi, and the site displayed a similar message when we accessed via Airtel 2G (Delhi) (screenshot).
However, other URLs appear to be working. For example, I picked up a random NDTV link from twitter, and the page opens, as does m.ndtv.com. It looks as if only the specific url ndtv.com has been blocked.
If you’re also not able to access ndtv.com from an Internet connection other than MTNL Delhi and Airtel 2G (Delhi), please leave a message and/or a screenshot in the comments. Also indicate which city you’re accessing NDTV.com from, and via which telecom operator/ISP.
Update: We’re not the only ones:
NDTV blocked? “The page you have requested has been blocked, because the URL is banned. URL = http://t.co/lrwnG3wWMc”
— Raghavendra Verma (@r_verma) November 7, 2014
Blocked on:
MTNL: Delhi
Airtel: 2G Delhi, Broadband Gurgaon, 3G Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bangalore.
Working on:
– Reliance Netconnect (Mumbai),
– Vodafone: 3G Chandigarh
Update: It might be an ISP issue, as indicated by NDTV’s tweet (below) but that begs the question – why is the ISP showing a banned page notification?
If you are facing problems opening http://ndtv.com, try http://www.ndtv.com. We are working with the ISPs to fix this issue.
— NDTV (@ndtv) November 8, 2014
@ahalam @ndtv DNS is resolving. It seems like domain level blocking. So even this doesn't open http://t.co/SXgNH83xBy
— Kawaljit Singh Bedi (@kawaljit) November 8, 2014
