After being removed from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store in India on Feb. 12, Free Fire has reportedly been banned along with 53 others applications by the country’s government.
According to a list of 54 apps released by local news channel ET NOW, Free Fire has been blocked along with several other games such as Onmyoji Arena, Onmyoji Chess, Rise of Kingdoms: Lost Crusade, and more.
ANI, a prominent news agency in the country, said in a report that the government of India has banned the applications because they posed a “threat to national security.” The report also said that the banned apps were of Chinese origin.
Free Fire, however, is developed by Singapore-based Garena. Its parent company, Sea Limited, is also based in the Southeast Asian country and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Garena and Sea have yet to react to the new development.
This isn’t the first time India has banned applications in the country. Since 2020, the country’s ministry of electronics and IT has banned more than 200 applications using section 69a of the Indian constitution’s IT Act. The ministry had alleged in a statement then that the apps were engaged in “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.” As a result, the apps were banned “in the interest of sovereignty of India, defense of India, and security of the state.”
While the ministry hasn’t released any official statement yet, the 54 apps have likely been banned for the same reasons and under the same act. Furthermore, the rules for blocking the apps under this act state that the banned accounts must remain confidential.
Update Feb. 14 8:55am CT: Garena sent the following statement to Dot Esports via an email: “We are aware that Free Fire is currently unavailable in the Google Play and iOS app stores in India and that the game is currently not operable for some users in the country. We are working to address this situation, and we apologize to our users for any inconvenience.”
