India Banned Supabase. People found way around.

On 24th February India issued an order to block Supabase under Section 69A of India’s Information Technology Act. After that, developers started claiming that their users are not able to access Supabase.

People who are new to Supabase, let me explain it to you. It is an open-source backend-as-a-service platform designed to replace Firebase. By using Supabase, you get all the essential backend components, such as authentication, database, file storage, serverless functions and much more, without managing infrastructure and writing them yourself.

The government did not give any reason for this ban. Also, this is an ISP-level ban. Some people are able to access Supabase with some ISPs, while others are not. Supabase hasn't become completely inaccessible in India, but it has become unreliable.

This was first reported by users using Jio Fibre. Then Supabase also verified this via an X post stating the ISP-level block by Jio and a temporary fix.

Some people also shared screenshots online showing the inaccessibility.

So I decided to try if it is a complete ban or a partial ISP-level ban. I'm from India itself, and I tried to connect to Supabase. I'm using Airtel Fibre, not Jio Fibre, and I was successfully able to connect to Supabase. Although supabase.co does not work for me either. This means that service has become unreliable.

It turns out that Indian ISPs have blocked the *.supabase.co domain via HTTP or HTTPS, and I'm not using HTTP to access the database; that's why it's working. But applications that have used Supabase Client SDK directly on the frontend are broken.

Switching my DNS as suggested by Supabase will work for local development, but developers can't ask all their affected users to switch their DNS.

Wayaround

A developer from India made JioBase. It is a backend reverse proxy. Now developers need to tweak their applications a little bit, and it will work for all users. Because the ban is on the user level, the *.supabase.co domain application can connect to JioBase, and JioBase can forward the request to Supabase servers.

Before You Go

If you made it this far, Thank You.

I usually write about backend engineering, distributed systems, and things I learn while working on real problems. Not theory — mostly practical stuff that I wish someone had explained to me earlier.

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