A global outage of Telegram's t.me short links has exposed a fundamental vulnerability in the messenger's infrastructure. The problem, which affected users worldwide, turned out not to be on Telegram's server side, but at the domain registry level.
Pavel Durov himself publicly appealed to the administration of the .me zone to look into the situation. According to WHOIS data, the t.me domain received the status serverHold — an EPP code that completely excludes the domain from the global DNS resolution system. Now any request to t.me returns an NXDOMAIN error, making the links non-functional in any browser, network, or geographic location.
Notably, the domain registration is paid until 2035, and the DNS servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure. This rules out the possibility of non-payment or a technical error on the registrar's side. The blocking decision was made at the level of the .me registry, managed by Identity Digital.
Causes and Context: From Sanctions to Legal Proceedings
There are no official comments yet from either Telegram or the registry. However, the community is discussing two main versions.
The first is sanctions-related. On July 13, the day of the outage, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list. Among its addresses is t.me/FirstVPNService. A direct link between this and the registry's actions has not been confirmed, but the coincidence of dates raises questions.
The second version is legal. The blocking coincided with the fourth interrogation of Pavel Durov by French investigators in a case related to his arrest in August 2024. However, there is no evidence of a direct connection between these events.
It is important to understand the scale: the .me registry also serves short links for PayPal, WordPress, and Meta applications (recognized as extremist in Russia). The potential risk to the entire .me ecosystem is extremely high.
Consequences for the TON Ecosystem
Telegram has already begun a workaround: when copying links, URLs in the format telegram.me are now generated instead of t.me. But the backup domain is in the same .me zone, which does not guarantee protection from a similar block.
The situation proved particularly sensitive for the crypto market. Through t.me/wallet, users launch a custodial wallet where they store USDT, Bitcoin, and Gram. The outage effectively cut off the main user entry point to the Gram token ecosystem with a capitalization of about $4.3 billion. This is a serious blow to trust in the TON infrastructure, which critically depends on the availability of short links.
Expert opinion: The situation with t.me is a wake-up call for the entire crypto industry, which relies too heavily on centralized DNS services. While Telegram looks for workarounds, TON users should consider decentralized alternatives for accessing their assets. Recovery could take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on how quickly the registry removes the serverHold status.