Twitter Is Back in Turkey After Just a Few Hours

That didn't last long.

The block on Twitter in Turkey has apparently been lifted after the microblogging site complied with a local court order, just a few hours after Turkish authorities ordered the ban and started to block access not just to Twitter but also to YouTube and, briefly, to Facebook.

On Monday afternoon, a Turkish official said that Twitter had complied with an order to remove pictures of an Istanbul prosecutor, who was held at gunpoint and later died in a standoff last week, and thus, it was getting unblocked.

"The ban will be lifted in a few minutes," the anonymous official told Reu​ters. "Users across Turkey will be able to access Twitter within the hour."

This seemed to be confirmed by Frederic Jacobs, an independent security researcher who's been monitoring the blocks.

BREAKING: TurkTelecom effectively unblocks Twitter. DNS cache might still delay service for some users. — The OSINT (@theosint)April 6, 2015

A spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard that Twitter complied with Turkish court order, but also that the company intends to appeal it.

At the time of writing, YouTube was still blocked, according to a test run by Jacobs. A YouTube spokesperson declined to comment.

Facebook was also briefly blocked on Monday, but the social network was the first to comply with a court order and get unblocked, as a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard.

"We received valid court orders from the authorities in Turkey requiring us to restrict access to certain content," the spokesperson said. "We have complied, but are appealing."

The blocks seem to have stemmed from a single court order from an Istanbul court that banned 166 URL addresses, as reported by The D​aily Dot, which published the court or​der in full.

Motherboard was able to confirm that the order covered 166 URLs across the internet, three of which were for Facebook. It's unclear, however, how many of those 166 URLs were for Twitter and YouTube.

The reason behind the court order was that the social networks were hosting pictures of Mehmet Selim Kiraz, the prosecutor who was held hos​tage at gunpoint in Istanbul last week by the far-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) militant group. Kiraz later died due to several gunshot wounds after authorities stormed the office where he was being held.

For many, today's blocks were sort of a deja vu. Last year, Turkey blocked Twitter for roughly two wee​ks and YouTube for over two mo​nths after incendiary recordings of government officials discussions were leaked online.

Given what happened last year, it's unclear how much these blocks do much more than attract media attention, including trending Twitter ​hashtags all over the world, and cause a sort of Streisand effect.

"Users [in Turkey] are among the world's savviest when it comes to the many means of circumventing these ham-fisted blocks," David Sullivan, the Policy and Communications Director of the Global Network Initiative, a nonprofit that fights internet censorship, told Motherboard. "But the threat of countrywide blocks remains a tool for the government in its ongoing legal, political and economic efforts to assert greater control over social media."

As news of the block spread on Monday, various groups that offer circumvention tools such as Psiph​on, Lanter​n, or Orb​ot (which is based on Tor) spread methods of getting around the block precisely on Twitter.

Change DNS server address to bypass for DNS blocks. Fallback on Tor and VPN when required. Both reportedly working.

— Telecomix Turkey (@TelecomixTurkey)April 6, 2015

UPDATE, 06/04/2015, 3:04 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to add Twitter's spokesperson comment.

UPDATE, 06/04/2015, 3:55 p.m. ET: A Turkish court has ordered Google to remove content related to Kiraz's incident or else the search giant will get blocked too, according to the country's ​official news agency, as well as ​other ​reports. The court has given Google until 1:30 a.m. local time (6:30 p.m. ET) to comply with the order. 

Google did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.