Linktree goes dark in India — and the company isn’t sure why

Linktree, the popular link-in-bio service used by millions of creators and businesses, has been inaccessible in India for several days — and its sudden disappearance from the Indian web remains a mystery, even to the Australian startup itself.

Over the past week, Linktree has been inaccessible in India, with a few users raising the issue on X. Initially, TechCrunch noticed that the site briefly displayed a message suggesting it had been blocked by the Indian government. Later, this was replaced by a generic SSL protocol error. The Linktree app has also been inaccessible in the country.

Founded in 2016, Linktree became a unicorn in 2022 and surpassed 50 million users in 2024. India has been the platform’s fifth-largest market by traffic, accounting for 3.5% of its global visits — or about 7.3 million in July, per Similarweb data shared with TechCrunch.

Linktree co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria told TechCrunch that the startup was looking into the situation. However, the executive did not confirm whether the startup received a communication from Indian authorities on its blockage.

The startup later posted on X that it was aware of the service outage in India and was “investigating” the issue.

As reported by the Indian daily The Hindu, the outage is not limited to a specific internet service provider and appears to affect all major networks.

The U.S. remains Linktree’s top market, with 48.5 million visits, followed by Indonesia (32.3 million), Brazil (30.8 million), and the U.K. (9.4 million), Similarweb data shows.

India’s IT and telecom ministries did not respond to emails sent over the weekend.