Telegram's global infrastructure has faced a serious incident: short links in the t.me format have stopped opening in browsers worldwide. Meanwhile, the app itself, as well as the backup domains telegram.me and telegram.org, are functioning normally. The issue has exclusively affected web redirects via shortened links, pointing to a failure at the Domain Name System (DNS) level.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly drew attention to the malfunction, addressing a request to the registry of the .me domain zone. The key takeaway from the current situation is that the company did not receive prior notice of the registry's actions, highlighting the suddenness and potential administrative nature of the problem.

Technical Background: The serverHold Status

The cause of the outage lies not within Telegram's own infrastructure, but at the domain registry level. The domain t.me has received the serverHold status in the .me zone registry. According to ICANN documentation, this status completely excludes the domain from global DNS resolution, regardless of the service's own infrastructure settings. In practice, this means any request to the domain now returns an NXDOMAIN error — the internet reports that the address does not exist. Consequently, the link stops working in any browser, network, or geographic location.

WHOIS data confirms that the domain now carries eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update timestamp of 2026-07-13T19:24:55Z. It is important to note that serverHold is an EPP status code that can only be set by the domain registry (in this case, Identity Digital for the .me zone), and it takes precedence over any settings of the registrar or DNS provider. The domain registrar is GoDaddy.com, and the domain itself was created on May 20, 2010, and registered until 2035, ruling out non-payment of renewal as a cause of the outage.

Potential Causes: From Sanctions to Legal Pressure

There is no official explanation from Telegram, the .me registry, or Identity Digital. Two main versions are circulating on social media, neither of which has been officially confirmed.

  • Sanctions Context: The first version links the shutdown to sanctions. It is claimed that the registry placed the domain in serverHold due to compliance requirements related to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Separately, it is noted that on July 13, OFAC published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list, with t.me/FirstVPNService among the addresses listed under it. However, there is no direct link between the sanctions and the registry's action regarding t.me.
  • Legal Pressure: The second line is related to Pavel Durov's personal situation. The suspension coincided with a period when French investigators interrogated him for the fourth time as part of a case linked to his arrest in August 2024. However, no evidence has been presented connecting the suspension to a specific legal proceeding or regulatory action.

Consequences for the TON Ecosystem

The scale of the outage is significant: t.me is Telegram's primary tool for link shortening, through which addresses for accounts, channels, stickers, and bots are distributed. For the crypto market, this situation has proven particularly sensitive. Since these links are how over a billion Telegram users access the platform's wallet, TON blockchain mini-applications, and collectible usernames, the outage has cut off the primary user entry point to the ecosystem of the GRAM token, valued at approximately $4.3 billion.

The platform has already begun to technically work around the problem: when copying links to chats, channels, or profiles, URLs in the telegram.me format are now generated instead of the standard t.me. However, it is worth noting that the backup domain is in the same .me zone and is not necessarily protected from a similar action.

My Expert Commentary: This incident is a powerful signal of the centralized risks for the entire TON ecosystem, which critically depends on DNS infrastructure controlled by third parties. Restoring t.me's functionality is not just a technical task but a matter of administrative interaction with the registry, which could take anywhere from several hours to several days. For the project's long-term sustainability, it is necessary to consider decentralized alternatives for name resolution, such as TON DNS, to avoid similar vulnerabilities in the future.