In India, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has sites blocked through confidential orders under Section 69A of the IT Act, courts order piracy sites blocked, and a 2025 law bans all online money games. Each provider blocks in its own way, often in its DNS (the internet's address book, which turns a site's name into a server address), with its own list, so ordinary sites get caught by list errors, and Airtel also blocks pages its own fraud filter flags. You may never see the order; a test through each provider's own connections shows whether your site is blocked there today.
Sources: SFLC.in, 3 March 2025 · MediaNama, 2 November 2026 · Press Information Bureau, 21 August 2025 · King Stubb & Kasiva, 17 April 2026 · Karan Saini, Poisoned Wells, Internet Governance Project, March 2026 (pp. 6, 14, 18) · TelecomTalk, 15 May 2025
Check your page in India now
The page is opened through home and mobile connections of Jio and Airtel and home connections of BSNL, ACT Fibernet and Kerala Vision and mobile connections of Vi, the way their customers would open it, and the answer comes provider by provider.
Who orders a site blocked in India, and will I be told?
Blocking orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act come from MeitY, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Rule 16 of the 2009 blocking rules keeps requests and actions confidential, and Rules 8 and 9 let notice go to the provider or platform instead of the site's owner, who may never get to object or see the reasons. The Software Freedom Law Centre, India (SFLC.in) has challenged this; the Supreme Court asked the government to respond on 3 March 2025.
Sources: SFLC.in, 3 March 2025 · MediaNama, 3 March 2025 · MediaNama, 2 November 2026
Gamban, a UK app that blocks gambling sites for people recovering from addiction, had its website blocked from 7 February 2023 without being shown the order; MeitY decided to unblock it only after the Delhi High Court set a deadline, telling Gamban on 2 November 2026.
Source: MediaNama, 2 November 2026
What does India's 2025 gaming ban mean for betting and fantasy sites?
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, passed by Parliament on 21 August 2025, bans all online money games, of chance, skill or both, including betting, poker, rummy and fantasy sports with cash prizes. It also bans their advertising, bars banks from processing the payments, covers services run from outside India, and lets the authorities block unlawful platforms under the IT Act. Between 2022 and June 2025, 1,524 betting and gambling websites and apps had already been blocked.
Source: Press Information Bureau, 21 August 2025
Its rules took effect on 1 May 2026 and set up the Online Gaming Authority of India, an office attached to MeitY that keeps and publishes the list of online money games.
Source: Press Information Bureau, 30 April 2026
A block does not always rest on a real order. In 2026 the Department of Telecommunications forwarded to internet providers two documents bearing the names of the Allahabad and Rajasthan High Courts, and 129 betting websites were blocked on them. The Allahabad judge's office said no such order had been passed; the Rajasthan court's registrar said the order appeared to be fraudulent.
Source: MediaNama, reporting Reuters, 12 November 2026
More for operators: Gambling operators guide.
Why is my site blocked on Airtel but open on Jio?
Indian law does not say how providers must block, so each chooses its own technique, and what users see depends on their provider. Poisoned Wells, the largest study of DNS blocking in India so far, its author says, tested 294 million domains at six providers between March and September 2025 and found 43,083 domains blocked through DNS, including 27,649 at Airtel, 15,245 at Jio and 14,173 at ACT Fibernet. Jio's lower count does not mean it blocks less, as it also uses other techniques.
Source: Karan Saini, Poisoned Wells, Internet Governance Project, March 2026 (pp. 2, 6, 12, 25, 26)
The lists differ widely. Among the blocked domains that could be tested at all six providers, only 4.54% of film and TV piracy domains and 13.48% of gambling domains were blocked by all six. Ordinary sites get caught too: Airtel blocked every name ending in .yokohama, probably through a misconfigured rule, the author says, and all six kept blocking names whose registration had expired. A domain you bought after someone else let it lapse may still be on a provider's list.
Source: Karan Saini, Poisoned Wells, Internet Governance Project, March 2026 (pp. 14, 16, 18)
A piracy order can grow during a tournament. For IPL 2026, the cricket tournament scheduled to start on 28 March 2026, the Delhi High Court granted JioStar a dynamic injunction: internet providers must block the pirate sites named and further sites JioStar reports during the tournament, and domain registrars must suspend them.
How do Jio, Airtel and ACT block a site?
In the 2025 study, the DNS of Jio and ACT Fibernet answered a blocked name with an address of their own, and Airtel's with a made-up name, dotblocking.dummy, so the visitor's browser never reaches your server.
Source: Karan Saini, Poisoned Wells, Internet Governance Project, March 2026 (p. 13)
Airtel also blocks on its own. Its fraud filter, launched in Haryana in May 2025 and in Tamil Nadu by June 2025 as part of a nationwide rollout, is on automatically for Airtel mobile and broadband customers where it runs; a flagged page does not load, and the customer sees a page explaining why. By September 2026 Airtel said it had blocked over 1.62 million malicious links. If the filter ever flagged a login or payment page by mistake, only Airtel customers would be affected.
Sources: TelecomTalk, 15 May 2025 · PTI in The Week, 11 June 2025 · Digit, 25 September 2026
To check a domain yourself, search it in the Poisoned Wells explorer at dnsblocks.in, a 2025 snapshot of DNS blocks at six providers, and in OONI Explorer, an open archive of network tests.
Sources: Poisoned Wells blocklist explorer, checked 13 November 2026 · OONI Explorer, checked 13 November 2026
Why an uptime monitor misses these blocks: Why datacenter monitors miss ISP blocks.
Which providers do people in India use?
As of 30 September 2026, TRAI, the telecom regulator, counted 1,300 million mobile subscriptions (144.85 million of them SIM cards in machines) and 48.89 million wired broadband connections. Shares by provider:
| Provider | Wired broadband connections | Mobile subscriptions |
|---|---|---|
| Jio | 30.52% | 39.32% |
| Airtel | 23.62% | 38.02% |
| Vi (Vodafone Idea) | not listed | 15.39% |
| BSNL | 9.39% | 7.25% |
| MTNL | not listed | 0.01% |
| ACT Fibernet | 5.11% | not listed |
| Kerala Vision | 3.21% | not listed |
Wired shares come from TRAI's counts for its five largest wired providers, which together hold 71.85%; fixed wireless connections, such as 5G and radio links, are counted separately.
Source: TRAI, Press Release No. 140/2026, 27 October 2026 (pp. 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 20)
What does linkspect check in India?
A check opens your URL through the home internet of Jio, Airtel, BSNL, ACT Fibernet and Kerala Vision customers and the mobile connections of Jio, Airtel and Vi customers. You can also include Vi home internet, BSNL mobile, MTNL home and mobile, and the home internet of Hathway, Excitel and Connect Broadband in a check; they are measured when a suitable test connection is available, and otherwise that answer says "not measured". Results may be incomplete: the addresses of the providers' own DNS servers are not verified yet, so a DNS block is marked "likely" at most, and a page that opened can show as grey "Not verified" when the main check for India could not be done (verdict reference).
Facts checked on 13 November 2026.