Internet users in India woke up Thursday morning to the big shock of multiple ISPs blocking direct access to Twitter profiles of various users. The blocked profiles belonged to journalists, and other individual users - not parody accounts (not that there's anything wrong with satire), not fake, misleading accounts, just seemingly normal accounts.
While direct access to these profiles by visiting http://www.twitter.com/user was blocked, these users could login to their accounts and post tweets normally. Tweets by these individuals showed by as usual in timeline of those who followed them. Users could also access these profiles via HTTPS (https://www.twitter.com/user) or via various third-party Twitter clients.
As you would expected, Twitter was up in arms over the issue and #GOIBlocks was trending on Twitter in no time. Soon thereafter, the blocks were apparently reversed, as the profiles were then accessible normally. Sources in MHA said the ministry had not issued, nor planned to issue, any instructions for blocking Twitter profiles belonging to any journalists.
We have confirmed reports of MTNL and Airtel blocking Twitter profiles of at least 5 users, and we received unconfirmed reports of other ISPs doing the same.
The incident comes a day after Airtel had blocked the entire youtu.be domain across its broadband and mobile users, only to reverse the block hours later.
Popular video website YouTube runs the youtu.be domain as a short-URL service for its full website. Thus, every video on YouTube has a corresponding youtu.be URL. This short URL is typically used while sharing videos on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which impose character limits.
Airtel did not acknowledge blocking the entire domain, but issued the following statement: "This is an industry specific issue and not just restricted to Airtel. We can't really comment on anything really specific but if you need comments it will be best if (you talk to) an industry body or the regulator talks about the same."