IIT Chennai has blocked the access of Social networking site Facebook within its campus. The faculty has defended this decision saying it has no link to moral policing and that this step was taken to ease the network pressure.

L.S Ganesh, Dean of IIT Chennai said, 

“ It has been blocked for some time. The network was getting severely clogged because of the amount of traffic .”

However, tech-savy students have found a way out of this problem. A student says

“ We can use Facebook through a proxy website or by making a small change to the URL. Anyway, usage is not excessive, so nobody seems to be overly upset that the site has been blocked.”

However the Institutes’s Annual festival is ahead and students are concerned about promoting this fest on the social network. Facebook, in the past, has attracted a huge audience for the show and thus the cultural wing of IIT Chennai is currently facing difficulties in promoting the annual festival.

Experts said that it was shocking to witness such measures taken by a top technical institute of a democratic country. It is unusual for an Institute to block a site in order to ensure smooth online traffic.