The MeitY Supabase Block: Why Shared Subdomains Pose a Risk to Indian Startups

The Section 69A Block: What Happened in February 2026?

In mid-February 2026, developers across India woke up to a catastrophic scenario: their production database queries, magical login links, and file storage buckets hosted on Supabase suddenly ceased to resolve. In browsers and backend server logs, requests threw immediate DNS lookup failures and network connection timeouts.

The disruption was not caused by a data center outage or code deployment bug. Instead, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) of the Government of India had issued a nationwide blocking directive under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Because a single malicious actor on the platform's free tier was hosting a phishing layout on a *.supabase.co subdomain, Indian ISPs (including Jio, Airtel, and Vi) were ordered to block DNS resolution of the primary domain, taking down hundreds of legitimate, fully compliant Indian startups simultaneously.

The Vulnerability of Shared Parent Subdomains

This incident highlighted a structural single-point-of-failure inherent to modern multi-tenant Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) architectures:shared parent subdomains.

When you register a project with global developers like Supabase, your API endpoint is structured as a subdomain under their generic domain:

https://[your-project-id].supabase.co

Because all projects—from large enterprise databases to malicious throwaway phishing templates—are hosted as sibling subdomains under supabase.co, any security action or blocking directive targeting the root domain or wildcards immediately isolates everyone. For an ISP, selectively blocking individual subdomains while allowing others is technically complex, resulting in standard blunt-force blocks of the entire top-level domain.

How to Protect Your Production Workloads

To safeguard your business from being collateral damage in collective domain blocks, you must isolate your backend endpoints. Here are key security practices to adopt:

• Mandatory Custom Domains: Never use a shared provider domain in production. Instead, bind your database API to your own corporate subdomains, such as api.yourdomain.com. Even if the provider's generic domains are blocked, your custom DNS bindings resolve independently.
• IP Whitelisting & Direct Peering: Connect backend servers directly to the database instance using direct peering or dedicated VPC tunnels (such as AWS Transit Gateway), bypassing public ISP DNS routing completely.
• Sovereign Regional Isolation: Select platforms that physically segment tenants inside dedicated clusters and isolate network routing.

How IndBase Cloud Prevents Collateral Blocking

At IndBase Cloud, we built our sovereign developer platform to isolate project workloads. We implement three lines of defense:

1. First-Class Custom Domains: IndBase provides custom domain mapping out-of-the-box, encouraging all production instances to route through distinct domain certs.
2. BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) Isolation: Enterprise projects can be deployed inside isolated Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) on your own AWS/GCP accounts, removing shared network risks.
3. Proactive Local Abuse Scanning: By utilizing local security heuristics, we block phishing configurations before they can trigger regulatory actions or ISP blocks.