In a move that has to be seen as nothing but an attempt to obfuscate information, the Indian government has ordered blocking of Wayback Machine hosted at archive.org/web. Unlike many porn sites, torrent sites and file hosts blocked in India, the Wayback Machine is a web tool that seemingly has public utility. This makes the ban strange. For now the blocking of the internet archive is sporadic with some ISPs blocking the website in some regions while in many other instances users getting through to the site.

Update: Finally, there is some information about why the Wayback Machine aka Internet Archives has been blocked in India. It has reportedly happened on the orders of Madras High Court, which was acting on a plea filed by the distributors of two movies. The court was approached by distributors of Jab Harry Met Sejal and Lipstick Under Burka seeking relief from people who they called pirates. The distributors gave the court a list of URLs that they wanted blocked in India and one of the URL in the list was archive.org aka Wayback Machine.

Update: While the ban is real, there is no explanation or communication from the government about it. The Wayback Machine reportedly reached out to both the Department of Telecom (DoT) and MeITY but has not received any response. "Multiple attempts to contact the DoT and MeitY (DeitY was the agency that ultimately ended up responding to us regarding the previous block) have gone unanswered thus far (we first tried to reach out to them about 22 hours ago). Obviously, we are disappointed and concerned by this situation and are very eager to understand why it's happening and see full access restored to archive.org," the organisation said in statement.