Cyclone Ditwah hit Chennai, causing heavy rainfall and flooding across the city and nearby areas (here and here). In this context, a video showing a waterlogged road with partially submerged vehicles has gone viral on social media, with claims that it depicts flooding in Chennai caused by the cyclone. Let’s find out the truth behind this video.
Claim: The viral video shows severe flooding in Chennai caused by Cyclone Ditwah.
Fact: The video is from Kolkata, available online since September 2025, whereas Cyclone Ditwah began in November 2025. The buildings seen in the viral clip match the geolocation in Kolkata, confirming that the video is not from Chennai. Hence the claim is FALSE.
To verify the truth, we examined the video closely and found that one of the submerged cars had a West Bengal registration number, not a Tamil Nadu one.
Then we performed a reverse image search on Google, which led us to the same video uploaded on a Facebook account named Kais Kalim on 25 September 2025, well before Cyclone Ditwah began in November 2025. The video was captioned as being from Kolkata.
To identify the location, we geolocated the restaurant seen in the viral video, named ‘Royal Indian Restaurant,’ which appears in Beck Bagan, Ballygunge, Kolkata (West Bengal 700017) on Google Street View. Nearby buildings also match the visuals seen in the clip. A side-by-side comparison of the viral video and Google Street View confirms that the video is from Kolkata, not Chennai.
To sum up, this flood video from Kolkata is falsely shared as visuals from Chennai following Cyclone Ditwah.
