Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Image: Drop of Light/Shutterstock
Turkish authorities blocked major cloud service providers and code hosting sides over the weekend amid the release of government leaks that brought president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime under the spotlight.
Now back up and running, GitHub, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox were briefly blocked in Turkey on Saturday 8 October, as the country’s government sought to manage the leak of over 57,000 emails.
According to Turkeyblocks.org, a watchdog that monitors censorship, the sites were fully accessible the following day.
The move came after hacking group RedHack released 17GB of emails dating back to 2000, highlighting relationships between the Turkish government and media groups, notably pro-government Twitter commenters.
The Daily Dot, which claims to have received the email dump in full, alleges that the leak shows how Erdoğan used his position to influence the media, with the publishing of select information in pro-government newspapers in particular focus.
“An Ankara court inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of the leak in an order regarding the investigation of RedHack members,” according to The Daily Dot.
Microsoft @Onedrive now blocked in #Turkey, joining @GoogleDrive and @Dropbox in nationwide cloud storage shutdownhttps://t.co/xObmf8D00j pic.twitter.com/Kmc8761iH9
— Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) October 8, 2016
Turkey has a history of online blockages. In July, Wikileaks was blocked in the country.
In January, social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google+ bowed to Turkish government pressure to pull certain posts off their pages or risk being blocked entirely.
The Turkish government has been vocal about its mistrust of sharing information online, having last year shut down or slowed down Twitter and YouTube on a number of occasions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Image: Drop of Light/Shutterstock
