The government of India has ordered internet service providers (ISP) to block WeTransfer, a file-sharing website in India.
On May 18, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT ) issued an order for blocking the file-sharing website but did not specify the reason for blocking the site.
WeTransfer is a popular file-sharing website on the web. It has millions of users worldwide, but the company has gained higher popularity in India during the ongoing lockdown days.
WeTransfer is a Dutch internet-based computer file transfer service launched in 2009 by which users can send files up to 2 GB free of cost, and premium service allows users to share up to 20 GB of files or folders and also offers 1 TB of storage space.
WeTransfer competes with other file transferring sites like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. The government has ordered to block the website at a time when hundreds of millions of people are working from home because of a nationwide lockdown. The clause directs all license holders to block websites in the "interest of national security or public interest".
"We have received reports that WeTransfer is being (partially) blocked in India. Our team is currently investigating the issue. We hope to have more details soon. In the meantime, the best workaround is to use a VPN service to access our site," it tweeted.
"At this moment in time, We Transfer seems to be blocked and unavailable in India," WeTransfer said in a blog post. WeTransfer has said that it is 'working hard to understand the reasoning behind this block' and doing everything to fix this, the company's said in blog post.
Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, and Hathway have blocked WeTransfer for their subscribers. However, the website is still accessible by Airtel users. The users who are not able to access the page get a message that reads, "You are not authorized to access this webpage as per the DoT compliance."
As alternative users can use dropbox and Google Drive.