Fault with Three’s network wrongly points to IWF

Three are currently (Wednesday 26 February 2020) experiencing a network issue which is incorrectly stating that webpages are blocked due to the IWF URL List. 

The IWF URL List is a list of ‘live’ webpages where we’ve found images and videos of child sexual abuse.

We do not carry out the blocking but provide a list of individual webpages which ISPs, filtering companies and others use to block and filter the criminal URLs on their networks.

Fred Langford, IWF Deputy CEO & CTO, said: “A fault with part of Three’s network is incorrectly signposting Three’s customers to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). We spoke to someone at Three who confirmed that the problem is being worked on with the highest priority, but because a filtering issue is incorrectly pointing people to the IWF URL List splash page, we are receiving some complaints which we’re responding to. 

“We never condone over blocking and we don’t carry out the blocking and filtering ourselves. We provide a list of ‘live’ child sexual abuse URLs to ISPs and filterers who block them at URL level to help stop the revictimisation of sexual abuse victims. As soon as the criminal images and videos have been removed at source, the URL is removed from our list. 

“It’s incredibly frustrating for us, and other companies, when services are incorrectly blocked. I’d like to reassure people that it’s not due to the IWF list.”