India blocked The Wire amid military conflict with Pakistan

On 9th May 2025, amid a 4-day drone and missile conflict with Pakistan, India blocked access to The Wire – an independent news media website – on at least 5 networks for a day. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in India claimed that access to The Wire was “blocked as per the order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the IT Act, 2000.”

The website block was reported to have happened alongside mass censorship on the social media platform X, which received executive orders to block over 8,000 accounts in India amid the conflict with Pakistan.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of thewire.in in India between 13th April 2025 to 12th May 2025.

As is evident, OONI measurements pertaining to thewire.in presented a spike in anomalies (signs of censorship) on 9th May 2025, the day The Wire reported the block, while previously thewire.in was found accessible on tested networks. This comparison (with past measurements) provides a signal of censorship. Moreover, the blocking of thewire.in is automatically confirmed in some cases based on blocking fingerprints.

OONI data suggests that access to thewire.in was blocked on at least five networks in India on 9th and 10th May 2025: AS24560 (Bharti Airtel Limited), AS55836 (Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited), AS45609 (Bharti Airtel Limited), AS24309 (Atria Convergence Technologies Pvt. Ltd.), AS9829 (AS9829 Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd).

At the same time, OONI data suggests that thewire.in remained accessible on some networks in India during the same period.

If you are in India, you can contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.