IIT-Madras blocks access to Facebook

Chennai, Jan 18: Social networking site Facebook has been blocked on the campus of Indian Institute of Technology-Madras since last week, said L S Ganesh, IIT-M dean.

According to the dean, Facebook has been blocked because of network congestion and heavy traffic.

"It has been blocked for some time. The network was getting severely clogged because of the amount of traffic," said LS Ganesh.

The institute keeping in mind the inflow of students have been trying to make minimal use of available resources. Freshers have been asked not to carry their laptops and are given laptops in the second semester, said a report in the Times of India.

"You can build a six-way highway, but too many cars can still make going slow. Then we are left with only two options - expand the highway or think about changing the traffic pattern. Usually the first option is not open. Our networks team is working diligently to see that the campus network works more efficiently," said Prof Ganesh.

"We can use Facebook through a proxy website or by making a small change to the URL. Anyway, usage is not excessive, so nobody seems to be overly upset that the site has been blocked," said a student.

Technical experts said that the fact that the country's most premier technical institutes had to block a site to enure smooth traffic was unusual.

OneIndia News