blocked on other ISPs like ACT as well. it is supposedly blocked by “competent authority” as is evident by the standard message you get “The URL has been blocked as per the instructions of the Competent Government Authority/ in compliance to the orders of Court of Law”. apparently some ISPs do only DNS based blocking but in other cases, they block using some other method which I deduce is SNI based blocking. Even with a custom DNS and https you’ll end up with
So very interestingly, when everyone was complaining about this being down, I never noticed. It was only because I was using Cloudflare and Google DNS. Of course, right after that we had a Cloudflare outage but it was resolved with minimal impact to us in India.
The New York Times is timing out on ACT Fibernet and Jio. Tried a few DNS servers but the IP address itself isn’t reachable on these ISPs. It is fine on Airtel and other VPN services.
From what I’ve seen, most of these blocks are done on a DNS level, which will basically prevent your browser from resolving the domain name to the IP and restrict access. Pick an alternate DNS provider than your ISP from here: Encrypted DNS Resolvers | PrivacyTools