India Orders GitHub to Take Down Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat Amid Protests

India’s cybercrime agency has ordered GitHub to take down the code for Bitchat, the decentralized messaging app built by Jack Dorsey, giving the Microsoft-owned platform three hours to comply.

The notice, issued Thursday by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs, named three repositories under the “permissionlesstech” account—the main Bitchat project, its Android build, and the Android releases page—and invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, 2000 and Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 IT Rules. It told GitHub to “remove and disable access” to the code without vitiating any evidence.

Bitchat routes messages directly between nearby phones over Bluetooth mesh networks, with no internet, servers, phone numbers, or accounts—a design I4C said “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation.” The agency warned the app could be exploited during “public disorder, riots, terrorism, organized crime, or internet shutdowns,” and cited provisions of the IT Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, India’s criminal code.

‘Cockroach’ protests

The order lands as India wrestles with a youth-led movement over exam-paper leaks. Tens of thousands have rallied in Delhi behind the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed fast-track courts for officials accused of rigging exams. With mobile internet cut around Parliament and the Jantar Mantar protest site, demonstrators turned to offline tools such as Bitchat.

Dorsey, the former Twitter chief and Block CEO, posted the notice with a terse line that the “government of india does not like technologies like bitchat,” while the Bitchat Community account said that “Governments that fear people talking without permission will always go after the tools that make it possible.” The Internet Freedom Foundation condemned the order as “unconstitutional and authoritarian,” arguing it named no unlawful content and bypassed India’s blocking procedures.

India is not the first state to move against the app. China ordered it pulled from Apple’s App Store in April, echoing Beijing’s 2023 ban on Dorsey’s Nostr-based Damus. Removing an app from a store limits distribution, while removing the source code tries to kill a project outright—though open-source code can be freely copied and mirrored.

Indeed, just hours after India’s crackdown, Bitchat repos were mirrored to decentralized code collaboration platform GitLawb. Days earlier, Dorsey’s Block launched Buzz, a decentralized platform pitched as a way to cut its own reliance on GitHub. Microsoft has not said whether it met the three-hour deadline.