For the last few years, various websites hosted on GitHub Pages/Google App Engine and fronted using Cloudflare have been blocked in India due to Cloudflare relying on a upstream network provider with a misconfigured network (Airtel). The network flow looks like this:
If a website is using "Flexible SSL" or "No SSL" as configured on Cloudflare, the connection between Cloudflare and (GitHub|Google) isn't encrypted, and Airtel blocks many such websites. Because Cloudflare terminates the TLS connection at their end, the browser shows a padlock, thus giving more authenticity to this incorrect block.
These are just a few of the many websites blocked. This disproportionately impacts the developer community, and especially older websites that had a reason to use Cloudflare on top of GitHub Pages - TLS support. Now that GitHub Pages natively offers SSL, most of these websites can directly be hosted on GitHub Pages.
Several of these websites are critical to many developers, and none of these deserve to get blocked in India. Some of the above website are no longer blocked, because the website owner switched away from Flexible SSL to Strict SSL. However, this only happens when someone notices the block, debugs the issue correctly, and the website owner understands and fixes the issue. This is not a viable solution in this case.
There's [hundreds reports on Twitter](https://twitter.com/search?q=blocked%20as%20per%20order%20of%20Ministry%20of%20Electronics%20and%20Information%20Technology) and [GitHub](https://github.com/search?q=blocked+India&type=Issues)
Hey @Cloudflare, please take care of this. Indian developers have been blocked out various critical websites because your upstream vendor (peering partner) has a misconfiguration. This has been going on for years, with no action or update at your end.
Flexible SSL is a decade-old product that has no place in the modern web. Users should get a big red warning when enabling such a product in today's times with free SSL certificates.
If you'd like to notify a site owner, please send them this link: https://github.com/captn3m0/hello-cloudflare/blob/main/README.md#help-my-website-is-blocked
If you'd like to support the fight to fix the state of Internet censorship in India, and bring more transparency on how it works, please [donate to the Internet Freedom Foundation](https://internetfreedom.in/donate/). You will need a valid Indian PAN Card.