A global outage of Telegram's t.me short link format has caused a significant stir in the crypto community. While the app itself, as well as the backup domains telegram.me and telegram.org, continue to operate normally, the issue exclusively affects web redirects via short links, directly impacting user experience and the TON blockchain infrastructure.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly complained about the malfunction, asking the administration of the .me domain zone to look into the situation. Notably, the company did not receive prior notice of such actions by the registry.

Technical Background of the Incident

The cause of the outage lies not in Telegram's infrastructure, but at the domain registry level. The domain t.me received the serverHold status in the .me zone registry, completely removing it from global DNS resolution. This means any request to the domain now returns an NXDOMAIN error, and the link stops working in any browser, regardless of the user's network or geographic location.

WHOIS data confirms that the domain now carries eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update date of July 13, 2026. The serverHold status is an EPP code that can only be set by the domain registry (in this case, .me managed by Identity Digital), and it takes precedence over any settings of the registrar or DNS provider.

The long registration period of the domain (until 2035) rules out non-payment of renewal as the cause. The name servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure, indicating that DNS delegation is not broken — the registry simply overrode resolution at a higher level.

Possible Causes and Context

No official explanation has been provided yet by Telegram, the .me registry, or Identity Digital. However, two main versions are circulating on social media:

  • Sanctions context: Several reports link the shutdown to demands from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). On the same day, July 13, OFAC published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list, with the address t.me/FirstVPNService listed under it. However, there is no official confirmation of a link between the sanctions and the registry's action regarding t.me.
  • Legal pressure: The suspension coincides with a period of renewed pressure on Pavel Durov, who was interrogated by French investigators for the fourth time last week as part of a case related to his arrest in August 2024. No evidence linking the suspension to a specific legal proceeding has been presented.

Consequences for the TON Ecosystem and Telegram's Response

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

The scale of the outage is significant: t.me is the primary tool for Telegram 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-apps, and collectible usernames, the outage cut off the primary user entry point to the ecosystem of the GRAM token, valued at around $4.3 billion. Specifically, users typically launch the Telegram custodial wallet via t.me/wallet, allowing them to buy, store, and transfer assets such as USDT, Bitcoin, and Gram.

My analysis: This incident is a warning signal for the entire TON ecosystem. It demonstrates the critical vulnerability of the centralized infrastructure on which a decentralized project depends. Dependence on a single domain name in the .me zone creates a single point of failure, contradicting the very philosophy of blockchain. Restoring domain functionality could take from several hours to several days, but strategically, the TON team and Telegram should consider decentralizing the domain infrastructure, possibly using blockchain-based systems like DNS on TON. For now, the serverHold status remains in place, and there are still no official comments.