On July 13, 2026, Telegram's global infrastructure faced an unexpected and serious incident. Short links in the t.me format stopped opening in browsers worldwide. At the same time, the messenger app itself, as well as the backup domains telegram.me and telegram.org, continued to operate normally. The problem exclusively affected web redirects via short links.
The cause of the outage lies not in Telegram's infrastructure, but at the domain registry level. The t.me domain 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, signaling to the internet that the address does not exist.
Technical details and possible causes
WHOIS data confirms that the domain now carries eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update timestamp of July 13, 2026. serverHold is an EPP status code that can only be set by the domain registry (in this case, Identity Digital), and it takes priority over any settings from the registrar or DNS provider. The domain is registered through GoDaddy until 2035, and its DNS servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure. This rules out non-payment of renewal as a cause.
There is no official explanation. Neither Telegram, nor the .me registry, nor Identity Digital have issued a statement. Two versions are circulating on social media. The first links the suspension to a sanctions context: allegedly, the registry applied serverHold due to compliance requirements related to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). On the same day, OFAC published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list, among whose listed addresses is t.me/FirstVPNService. However, there is no direct connection between the sanctions and the registry's action against the entire t.me domain. The second version links the incident to the personal situation of Pavel Durov, who was interrogated by French investigators last week for the fourth time in a case related to his arrest in August 2024. No evidence linking the suspension to a specific legal proceeding has been presented either.
Consequences for the TON ecosystem
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. However, it is worth noting that the backup domain is in the same .me zone and is not necessarily protected from a similar action.
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-apps, and collectible usernames, the outage cut off the main user gateway to the ecosystem of the GRAM token, valued at approximately $4.3 billion. Specifically, users typically launch Telegram's custodial wallet via t.me/wallet, allowing them to buy, store, and transfer assets such as USDT, Bitcoin, and Gram.
Analyst's opinion: This incident is a stark demonstration of the fragility of centralized points of failure, even in decentralized ecosystems. TON's dependence on the t.me domain, controlled by a third-party registry, is a systemic risk that could undermine trust in the platform. The further development of events depends on how quickly Telegram and the .me registry can resolve the issue. According to industry practice, this process can take anywhere from a few hours to several days.