Some users report Medium is blocked in Malaysia

(Update: Medium has responded in a blog post on January 27. You can read about it here.)

There’s been persistent rumors that Malaysian internet service providers have blocked access to Medium after the British journalist behind the controversial Sarawak Report supposedly took her whistleblowing to the blogging platform.

For those who aren’t familiar with the issue, Sarawak Report’s site founded by Clare Rewcastle Brown alleged that money from state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was pocketed by Prime Minister Najib Razak.

The site reported extensively on corruption allegations linked to Najib in July last year and has since been blocked.

It’s not a surprise then that Medium could be blocked too, if Clare did take her reporting there.

We’ve asked at least four sources in Kuala Lumpur – most of whom are startup founders who asked to remain anonymous in this article – to help us check whether or not Medium was still accessible. One source tried to access the site through Facebook on mobile, and got this message:

Two tried to access the blog via web browsers and it wouldn’t load at all. There was no message about it being blocked, however.