India's History of Blocking Developer Tools: From GitHub to Supabase

The pattern

India's Information Technology Act, specifically Section 69A, gives the central government the power to direct ISPs to block any website or online service. The stated purpose is to protect national security, sovereignty, and public order. In practice, the mechanism has been used against a wide range of targets, from social media platforms to code repositories.

The process lacks transparency. Blocking orders are issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to ISPs directly. There is no public notice before a block takes effect. There is no appeals process for the affected service. In most cases, the order itself is classified and never made public, meaning neither the blocked service nor its users are told exactly why it was blocked.

For developers, this creates a uniquely frustrating situation. The tools you build your business on can vanish from your network without warning. Your code still works, your deployment is still live, your database is still running. But your users in India suddenly cannot reach any of it.

Timeline of developer tool blocks

Here is a chronological look at every significant instance of developer-relevant platforms being blocked by Indian ISPs. Each entry includes the year, the service affected, which ISPs enforced the block, and what triggered it.

Why developer tools get caught in the crossfire

The core issue is that India's blocking mechanism is content-agnostic at the domain level. When a blocking order targets a specific piece of content hosted on a platform, ISPs do not have the technical capability (or the mandate) to block just that one resource. Instead, they block the entire domain.

This means that one objectionable page hosted on GitHub can result in all of github.com being blocked. One problematic project on Supabase can result in every *.supabase.co subdomain becoming unreachable. The collateral damage is enormous.

The net neutrality problem

India adopted strong net neutrality regulations through TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) recommendations in 2017. These regulations prohibit ISPs from arbitrarily blocking or throttling specific websites or services. In theory, this should protect developer tools from being blocked.

In practice, Section 69A of the IT Act overrides net neutrality protections. When the government issues a blocking order under Section 69A, ISPs are legally required to comply, regardless of net neutrality rules. The blocking order takes precedence.

This creates a legal framework where ISPs cannot choose to block websites on their own, but the government can direct them to block anything it deems necessary. The lack of transparency in the process means developers have no way to predict which services might be blocked next.

What developers can do

Given the history, it is clear that ISP-level blocks are not a one-time event. They are a recurring pattern that will continue to affect developer tools. Here are concrete steps you can take to protect your applications.

Why JioBase exists

JioBase was born from this exact problem. When the Supabase block hit in February 2026, thousands of Indian developers were left with broken production apps and no clear fix. Changing DNS did not work for end users. VPNs were not a production solution. Self-hosting a proxy required Cloudflare knowledge that not everyone had.

JioBase is a managed reverse proxy that routes your Supabase API traffic through Cloudflare's edge network. Your users connect to yourapp.jiobase.com instead of yourproject.supabase.co. Since the JioBase domain is not blocked, everything works. The ISP never sees supabase.co in any DNS query or TLS handshake.

It takes under 60 seconds to set up. Run npx create-jiobase and you get a deployed proxy. You change one URL in your Supabase client configuration and deploy. No SDK changes, no code refactoring, no infrastructure to manage. Your app becomes resilient to ISP blocks immediately.

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