Supabase Network Connectivity Problems in India: Causes, Diagnosis, and Fix

The symptoms: what you are seeing

Developers across India are reporting the same cluster of errors. If any of the following look familiar, you are dealing with the same underlying issue:

Root cause: ISP-level DNS blocking, not a Supabase outage

This is not a Supabase infrastructure problem. Supabase servers are online, healthy, and accessible from every country outside India. The real cause is that Indian ISPs are DNS-poisoning all *.supabase.co domains under a government blocking order issued through Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

When your application (or your user's browser) tries to resolve a domain like yourproject.supabase.co, the ISP's DNS resolver intercepts the query and returns a sinkhole IP address instead of the real Supabase server. Your app connects to this sinkhole, which silently drops all packets, and your request hangs until it times out.

This is why the Supabase dashboard works but the API does not. The dashboard lives on supabase.com (not blocked), while all project APIs live on supabase.co (blocked).

Common misdiagnoses vs the real problem

Before you spend hours debugging your code, rule out these common wrong assumptions:

How to diagnose: confirm it is DNS poisoning

Run these commands from your terminal to confirm that your ISP is poisoning DNS responses for Supabase domains.

Step 1: Compare DNS results

Use nslookup to query your ISP's DNS and then Cloudflare's DNS. If they return different IPs, your ISP is intercepting the query.

Step 2: Use dig for more detail

The dig command gives you more verbose output, including the authoritative nameserver and TTL values.

Step 3: Test with curl

Attempt a direct HTTP request to your Supabase project. If it times out, then force the real IP using --resolve to bypass DNS.

If the first curl times out but the second one succeeds, the block is confirmed. Your ISP is returning a fake DNS response for *.supabase.co, and no amount of code changes will fix it.

Why the Supabase dashboard works but the API does not

This is the single most confusing part for developers hitting this issue. You can log into supabase.com, view your project, run queries in the SQL editor, and everything seems fine. But your application cannot reach the API at all.

The reason is straightforward: Supabase uses two separate domains for different purposes.

The blocking order targets *.supabase.co specifically. The .com domain is unaffected. So you can manage your project but your users cannot use it.

Fixes that do not work for production apps

Every forum thread and Stack Overflow answer suggests these workarounds. They might help you during development, but none of them solve the problem for your end users.

The real fix: reverse proxy through Cloudflare

The only production-viable solution is to route your Supabase API traffic through a domain that is not blocked. A reverse proxy sitting on Cloudflare's edge network accepts requests from your users on an unblocked domain and forwards them to Supabase server-side, completely bypassing ISP DNS restrictions.

JioBase is a managed reverse proxy built specifically for Indian developers facing this problem. It runs on Cloudflare Workers across 300+ edge locations, adding only 1 to 5ms of latency. Here is how to set it up:

Step-by-step migration: swap one environment variable

The migration requires changing exactly one value in your environment configuration. Here are examples for the most common frameworks.

Next.js

Before (broken on Indian ISPs):

After (works everywhere):

React (Vite)

Before:

After:

Flutter

Before:

After:

How the reverse proxy resolves connectivity

Here is the request flow after you switch to the proxy URL:

PROXIED FLOW (works on all Indian ISPs):

  User's Browser         ISP DNS         Cloudflare Edge     Supabase
    |                      |                  |                 |
    |--- DNS query -------->|                  |                 |
    |    myapp.jiobase.com |                  |                 |
    |                      |                  |                 |
    |<-- Real CF IP -------|                  |                 |
    |    (not blocked)     |                  |                 |
    |                      |                  |                 |
    |--- HTTPS request ----------------------->|                 |
    |                                         |                 |
    |                              Worker rewrites URL          |
    |                              myapp.jiobase.com ->         |
    |                              abcdefgh.supabase.co         |
    |                                         |                 |
    |                                         |--- forward ---->|
    |                                         |                 |
    |                                         |<-- response ---|
    |                                         |                 |
    |<-- proxied response ------------------|                 |
    |                                                           |

The key insight: Cloudflare's servers resolve *.supabase.co from their own infrastructure, which is not subject to Indian ISP DNS blocks. The request reaches Supabase normally on the server side.

Self-hosted alternative: deploy your own Cloudflare Worker

If you prefer to manage the proxy yourself, you can deploy a basic Cloudflare Worker that forwards requests to Supabase. We provide a free Worker Generator Tool that creates a ready-to-deploy script.

The self-hosted approach works well for simple use cases but does not include WebSocket proxying (needed for Supabase Realtime), analytics, rate limiting, or automatic health checks that the managed JioBase service provides.

For a detailed walkthrough of setting up a self-hosted proxy, see our Cloudflare Workers proxy tutorial.

Frequently Asked Questions