The Supabase India Ban Explained: Who's Affected, Why It Happened, and What Comes Next
India silently blocked Supabase on February 24 — no warning, no reason given. Thousands of apps broke overnight. Startups lost sign-ups. Developers are scrambling. The government still hasn’t spoken. What triggered this sudden ban on a ₹125 crore developer platform — and is your tech stack next?
On the morning of February 24, 2026, thousands of Indian developers sat down at their desks, opened their laptops, and found their apps broken — not because of a bug in their code, not because of a server outage halfway across the world, but because the Indian government had quietly issued a blocking order against Supabase, one of the most widely used developer backend platforms in the world.
No press release. No warning. No reason given.
If you’re a developer, startup founder, or tech professional in India and you’ve been struggling to make sense of this incident, you’re in the right place. This is a complete, ground-up breakdown of what happened, who is impacted, why this matters far beyond just one platform, and what Indian developers can do right now.
What Is Supabase and Why Do Developers Love It?
Before we get into the ban itself, it helps to understand what Supabase actually is — because this isn’t a social media app or a content platform. Supabase is infrastructure. It’s the engine running silently behind thousands of apps you may use every day.
Think of it as the open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase. It gives developers a hosted PostgreSQL database, built-in user authentication, real-time data subscriptions via WebSockets, file storage, and serverless edge functions — all through a clean, intuitive API. For a solo developer building a startup MVP or a small team launching a SaaS product, Supabase is transformative. It eliminates months of backend setup work and makes sophisticated app development accessible without a large DevOps team.
What makes Supabase especially popular in India is its generous free tier. For a country with a rapidly growing number of independent developers, student coders, and bootstrapped founders, free-tier access to enterprise-grade backend infrastructure is not a luxury — it’s a lifeline. India had become Supabase’s fourth-largest market globally, accounting for roughly 9% of all global traffic and logging approximately 365,000 visits in January 2026 alone — a staggering 179% year-over-year growth, according to data from Similarweb.
What Exactly Happened on February 24?
The first signs of trouble appeared on February 24 at around 14:46 UTC, when Supabase began receiving reports from developers in the Asia-Pacific South-1 region unable to connect to their projects. By mid-afternoon, the company’s technical team had identified something unusual: ISP-level DNS manipulation. Reliance Jio’s internal DNS servers — the “phonebook” that translates domain names into IP addresses — were not serving correct responses for Supabase domains.
In simpler terms: when Jio users tried to reach any app built on Supabase, Jio’s system was quietly giving them the wrong address. The app appeared broken from the user’s end, with no clear explanation.
Within days, the problem spread. Users began reporting identical issues on Airtel and ACT Fibernet connections. Supabase’s status page confirmed on February 26 that its infrastructure remained fully operational globally — the issue was entirely within India’s internet layer. By February 27, TechCrunch confirmed through a source familiar with the matter that a formal blocking order had been issued on February 24 under Section 69A of India’s Information Technology Act.
Section 69A: The Law Behind the Block
Section 69A of India’s IT Act is a powerful and controversial provision. It gives the Central Government — specifically designated officers within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) — the authority to direct any internet service provider to block public access to any online resource in the interest of:
- National security and sovereignty
- Defence of India
- Public order
- Prevention of incitement to cognisable offences
- Relations with foreign states
The government is not required to publicly disclose why a blocking order is issued. There is no mandatory public notice to the platform being blocked, and no requirement to inform users. The orders are often served confidentially, and ISPs are legally obligated to comply.
This is the same provision under which India banned 59 Chinese apps in 2020, including TikTok and WeChat. It has also been used to block VPN services, content websites, and — as recently as October 2025 — Medium.com, the popular blogging platform, which faced similar unexplained ISP-level disruptions on Jio and Airtel networks before the issue was quietly resolved.
As of March 1, 2026, the Indian government has not publicly cited any reason for the Supabase block. MeitY has not responded to Supabase’s public appeals, and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has not commented on the matter — despite Supabase directly tagging him on X (formerly Twitter) on February 27 asking for intervention.
Who Is Affected?
The impact of this block is both immediate and layered. Let’s break it down by who is feeling the pain most acutely.
Independent Developers and Students: This group is arguably the hardest hit. Indie developers and CS students across India have built side projects, portfolio apps, and early-stage startup prototypes entirely on Supabase’s free tier. With the block in place, their projects — many of which run in production for real users — are effectively down.
Startup Founders: Multiple Indian founders have spoken to the press, mostly anonymously out of fear of repercussions. One Bengaluru-based founder told reporters they had seen zero new user sign-ups from India for several consecutive days. Another startup founder confirmed that even a few hours of downtime translated to disruption for paying customers. For early-stage SaaS companies, Supabase is not optional tooling — it is core infrastructure.
Tech Consultants and Agencies: Development agencies building client products on Supabase face an acute problem: they cannot reliably access the platform for either development or production purposes. Projects that were mid-build when the block hit have been effectively frozen.
Live Production Applications: This is perhaps the most critical dimension. Unlike blocking a website, blocking access to a backend platform like Supabase disrupts active applications — apps used by real Indian end-users who have no idea why features have stopped working. Authentication systems fail. Real-time updates break. File uploads return errors. These aren’t edge cases; they’re central app functions.
The Broader Pattern: India's Opaque Blocking Regime
What makes this incident more than just a one-off tech story is the pattern it fits into.
India has a well-documented history of issuing website and platform blocking orders under Section 69A with minimal transparency. In August 2025, state-owned BSNL blocked access to legitimate platforms including Dailymotion, TheMovieDB, and Telegram-shortened URLs — providing no public reason even after Right to Information (RTI) requests were filed. In October 2025, Medium faced near-identical ISP-level blocks on Jio and Airtel, again with no explanation.
What is different this time — and what makes the Supabase case a watershed moment — is that this is the first high-profile case of a developer infrastructure platform, not a consumer content service, being blocked. Supabase is not distributing videos, running a social feed, or hosting user-generated content. It is plumbing. It is the pipes that other apps run through.
Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now, a leading digital rights organisation, captured the concern precisely when he told TechCrunch: "You don't know where you can safely run projects without the danger that something might happen where it gets blocked, and suddenly you're scrambling to find a way."
This uncertainty is deeply corrosive. For India to realise its ambitions as a global startup hub and technology superpower, its developer ecosystem needs reliable, uninterrupted access to the global cloud infrastructure stack. That stack includes platforms like Supabase, Firebase, AWS, Vercel, and dozens of others. If any of these can be blocked at any moment under an opaque and legally unchallenged order, it introduces a systemic risk that no startup or investor can simply ignore.
What Supabase Is Doing About It
Supabase has been vocal and transparent throughout this crisis, which stands in sharp contrast to the Indian government's silence.
The company has directed affected users to switch their DNS settings to alternative providers — Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8), or Quad9 (9.9.9.9) — as an immediate workaround. For developers using the custom domain feature, Supabase has recommended switching the custom domain's DNS to an alternative provider and enabling proxying, which can restore connectivity in some cases.
However, Supabase has also been honest that these workarounds are impractical for most end users. A developer might be able to switch DNS settings on their own machine, but the Indian users of their app cannot be expected to do the same. The problem is structural.
Beyond technical workarounds, Supabase publicly appealed to IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on February 27, stating:
"Supabase is used by millions of developers worldwide, and millions of users in India are currently unable to access our platform due to these blocks. Could we talk to someone in your team about this?"
The post was later removed, possibly as part of private diplomatic efforts, but the company confirmed the block remained in force for many users.
What Indian Developers Can Do Right Now
If you are currently affected, here are the most practical steps:
Switch your DNS immediately. Change from your ISP's default DNS to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8), or Quad9 (9.9.9.9). This resolves access for many users at the individual device level.
Use a VPN for development work. VPNs are a short-term fix and carry their own complications in the Indian regulatory environment, but for accessing Supabase for active development, they work.
Enable custom domains and proxy routing. If you are a developer with a production application running on Supabase, enabling the custom domain feature and routing through a proxy gives you more flexibility to reroute traffic if ISP blocks persist.
Evaluate your infrastructure risk. This incident is an important signal to audit your dependency on any single third-party platform. Consider architecting your app so that your backend API endpoints are abstracted behind your own custom domain — this gives you the ability to migrate or reroute without your end users experiencing downtime.
Report to your ISP. Supabase has specifically asked affected users to formally report the issue to their internet service providers. Volume of formal complaints matters in regulatory conversations.
What Comes Next?
As of the time of publishing, the block remains in force for a significant portion of Indian users, with access continuing to be inconsistent across ISPs and geographies. Users in some parts of Bengaluru on ACT Fibernet have reported working access, while those in Delhi on Jio, Airtel, and ACT Fibernet remain blocked.
There are three possible trajectories from here. The first is a quiet resolution — the government lifts the block without public explanation, as has happened with past incidents like Medium.com. The second is prolonged ambiguity, where the block partially persists across some ISPs while being lifted on others, leaving Indian developers in a state of permanent uncertainty. The third — and most damaging — is that the block becomes permanent or the government extends it to related infrastructure platforms.
Supabase, for its part, has said it is pursuing resolution through every available channel. The developer community's response on social media has been swift and angry, with many prominent Indian engineers publicly stating that incidents like this make it harder to build and invest in India's tech ecosystem.
What this situation has made undeniably clear is that India's website blocking regime — designed decades ago primarily for consumer content — is poorly equipped to handle developer infrastructure in a nuanced way. Blocking supabase.co does not just take down a website. It breaks thousands of apps, disrupts live production systems, kills startup sign-ups, and sends a chilling message to every developer who has built or is considering building on modern cloud infrastructure in India.
That is a conversation the Indian government urgently needs to have — in public, with transparency, and with the developer community at the table.
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