Yahoo Finance DuckDuckGo comes back after being blocked by Indian ISPs
DuckDuckGo is once again available in India, after the privacy-focused search engine was discovered to be mysteriously offline since 1 July.
“We’re seeing our services being broadly restored in India”, the company tweeted on 4 July, “Thank you for all of your reports, bringing attention to this issue. If you're still having trouble accessing DuckDuckGo Search, please report it to [the Internet Freedom Foundation]”.
It remains unclear why DuckDuckGo was inaccessible for the Indian people for such a long amount of time.
The Indian government recently announced a list of nearly 60 applications sourced from China which the government claims were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India”.
Those applications were banned. The ban included many popular applications including WeChat and TikTok, as well as mobile games such as Clash of Kings.
DuckDuckGo’s headquarters are in Pennsylvania in the United States, however, and the company was not on the list of banned apps.
Other users reported DNS lookup errors as the cause of the fault.
“We have contacted the Indian government but have not yet received a response,” a DuckDuckGo spokesperson had told The Verge over the weekend. “We are bewildered on why the Indian government would instruct Indian ISPs to block DuckDuckGo, but are optimistic that this will be resolved soon.”
The comapny told The Independent that it was " still trying to gather information to establish why this happened". It encouraged any users affected by blackouts at DuckDuckGo or other websites to the "Save The Internet" project, which is run the by the Internet Freedom Foundation.
