UPDATE 2! Twitter was blocked in Turkey after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “wipe out” Twitter and other social media. (He’s trying to contain a corruption scandal a few days before an election there.) But tweets are up 138% in part because of a viral graffiti-writing campaign that spreads the word on the walls of Istanbul about Google’s Public DNS service, which enables users to access Twitter.

UPDATE! Here’s what some of Turkey’s top entrepreneurs and investors think about the sudden Twitter ban.

Turkey has blocked access to Twitter, hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to close down the social media platform.

“We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic,” Erdoğan said at his campaign rally in the western city of Bursa on March 20, 10 days before the upcoming local elections.

The Press Advisory of the Prime Ministry later clarified Erdoğan’s statement, arguing that Twitter officials currently “ignore” some court rulings in Turkey, which order the social media platform to “remove some links” as per the complaints filed by Turkish citizens.

Just before midnight, access to Twitter was already blocked in Turkey. The Communication Technologies Institution (BTK), which was given extraordinary powers with the recently passed Internet law, lists three court rulings and one prosecutor decision on its website as the reason of the outage.

Eventually, all Internet service providers (ISP) in Turkey have abided by the rulings, as Turkish social media users have started to figure out ways to circumvent the blocking, like DNS-tweaking and VPN services.

On March 6, Turkey’s premier had also threatened to shut down Facebook and YouTube “if necessary,” via the controversial recently passed law. YouTube has been repeatedly banned in Turkey in the past decade.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has more than 4 million followers himself and you can follow him here.

[Source]