Privateness-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has been restored in India after being unreachable for a lot of customers there since July 1st, according to a report by Android Police. Experiences about what was the reason for the outage have diversified. Some customers reported the Indian authorities seemed to be behind the block, and others mentioned they had been getting what appeared to be DNS lookup errors.
DuckDuckGo tweeted that the service seemed to be restored in India as of Saturday morning.
We’re seeing our services being broadly restored in India. 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 @internetfreedom using this form: https://t.co/jVYFgXTiV7
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 4, 2020
On June 29th, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology banned more than 50 China-based apps together with TikTok and WeChat, saying they had been “engaged in actions … prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India,” according to a press release.
It’s not clear whether or not Pennsylvania-based DuckDuckGo could have been inadvertently blocked as a part of that bigger effort, or whether or not there was one more reason for the outage. DuckDuckGo was not on the Indian government’s June 29th list of banned apps.
DuckDuckGo didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark Saturday.