Telegram's domain is back online after an outage
Telegram’s short domain, t.me, resumed service on July 14 following a temporary outage that prevented users around the world from opening links. The messaging app itself continued to operate normally during this time.
According to industry sources, the operator of the .ME domain zone confirmed that it had temporarily disabled the domain due to requirements to comply with U.S. sanctions.
Experts suggest that the cause may have been a technical glitch or an overzealous application of sanctions restrictions. In particular, the entire t.me domain may have been mistakenly blocked instead of a specific link to the Ukrainian VPN service FirstVPN, which was added to the sanctions list of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on July 13.
Telegram has not officially commented on the reasons for the incident. During the outage, the service automatically used the telegram.me domain to generate new links.
Source: Durov’s Code.
As a reminder, Telegram’s short links via the t.me domain stopped working worldwide on July 14 after being blocked at the domain registrar level. The messenger’s founder, Pavel Durov, was forced to contact the domain zone operator to request an explanation for the outage via the X network.
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