The Turkish government has blocked access to a number of cloud-based storage services including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and GitHub, the code hosting platform.
Turkish users of Microsoft’s OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive are facing trouble accessing the cloud-storage providers. The government has blocked access to them, following the leak of a batch of private emails that allegedly belong to Berat Albayrak, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. Incidentally, he is also the son-in-law of Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey.
Real-time internet censorship watchdog TurkeyBlocks reported that both Google Drive and Dropbox were issuing SSL errors when attempting to access the services. This fundamentally points to traffic to the domains intercepted at the ISP or a wider national level.
The information and communications regulatory authority even released a block notice for Google Drive. It stated:
After technical analysis and legal consideration based on the Law Nr. 5651, ADMINISTRATION MEASURE has been taken for this website (drive.google.com) according to Decision Nr.490.05.01.2016.-156393 dated 08/10/2016implemented by Information and Communication Technologies Authority.
Although the block specifically mentions Google’s service, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive platforms also fall under the recently enforced censorship.
Notably, tourists and foreign visitors in the country using roaming data are still able to connect to these services since their data packets and connection are tunneled from their countries to begin with.
Beyond the mainstream cloud storage operators, GitHub – the platform for open-source coding and infrastructure also saw collateral damage from the blockade.
TurkeyBlocks has ascertained that most, if not all Turkish internet service providers are affected by the blockade. Some of the lesser known internet providers have not been targeted by the government-induced censorship.
The blockade is certain to inconvenience and impact everday individuals who use services like Google Drive and Dropbox on their mobile phones and desktops to upload or share everything from photos, media, business documents, authorized signatory papers and more.
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