NordVPN confirmed on Tuesday that it will no longer be able to keep its servers in India. This comes after India’s new cyber security guidelines were announced which will be in effect from this month. Also Read - CERT-In flags bugs in Chrome OS, Mozilla products that can allow attackers to gain access to your data

NordVPN is quitting the Indian market

The Lithuania-based VPN company, NordVPN is valued at $1.6 billion. It is one of the most popular VPN apps in the market and is widely used by Android, iPhone, Windows, and other system users. On Tuesday, it confirmed that it is quitting India by removing all its servers from the country as it doesn’t and won’t maintain any data of customers as required by the Indian government authority Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). Also Read - ExpressVPN becomes first VPN provider to leave India: Here’s why

“Moreover, we are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers. Therefore, we are no longer able to keep servers in India,” said Laura Tyrylyre to TechCrunch. Also Read - Parliamentary Committee urges government to ban VPN services in India: Report

The VPN company will remove its servers by 26 June in India as the new cybersecurity rules will go into effect on 27 June. Moreover, the company will send notifications to its Indian users starting on 20 June about its exit.

“Our Indian servers will remain until 26 June 2022. In order to ensure that our users are aware of this decision, we will send notifications with the full information via the NordVPN app starting on 20 June. As digital privacy and security advocates, we are concerned about the possible effect this regulation may have on people’s data. From what it seems, the amount of stored private information will be drastically increased throughout hundred or maybe thousands of different companies. It is hard to imagine that all, especially small and medium enterprises, will have the proper means to ensure the security of such data, ” she continued.

If you are unaware, the Indian government has appointed CERT-IN to protect cybersecurity information and as per their new guidelines, it will require VPN, VPS, cloud service providers, virtual asset providers, virtual asset exchange providers, and similar type of companies to store customers’ names, email address, IP address, financial transactions for over next five years.

Considering these rules, several other popular VPN companies have backed out from the Indian market. So far, ExpressVPN and SurfShark have announced the removal of their servers in India.

Although NordVPN’s servers will be removed in India, the company plans to offer “virtual server locations” to Indian customers. However, we aren’t sure how that will work, as by doing that, it will still breach the guidelines by CERT-IN.