A global outage of Telegram's t.me short links format came as an unexpected blow to millions of users worldwide. The issue exclusively affected web redirects—the Telegram app itself, as well as the sites telegram.me and telegram.org, continue to function normally. The cause was not in the messenger's infrastructure, but at the domain registry level, raising serious questions about decentralization and the resilience of the TON ecosystem.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov himself publicly appealed to the administration of the .me domain zone to look into the situation. Apparently, the company did not receive prior notice of the block. The t.me domain received the serverHold status in the .me zone registry, completely removing it from global DNS resolution. Now any request to the domain returns an NXDOMAIN error, meaning the link has stopped working in any browser, network, or geographic location.

Technical Details and Possible Causes

WHOIS data confirms that the domain now has eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update timestamp of 2026-07-13T19:24:55Z. serverHold is an EPP code that can only be set by the domain registry (in this case, Identity Digital), and it takes precedence over any settings of the registrar or DNS provider.

No official statements have yet been made by Telegram, the .me registry, or Identity Digital. Two main versions are circulating on social media:

  • Sanctions context: The outage is linked to requirements from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). On 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. There is no direct evidence linking these events, but the coincidence of dates raises questions.
  • Legal pressure on Durov: The block coincided with the fourth interrogation of Pavel Durov by French investigators in a case related to his arrest in August 2024. However, no documents connecting these two events have been presented either.

Consequences for the TON Ecosystem

The scale of the outage is colossal: t.me is Telegram's primary tool for shortening links, through which addresses of accounts, channels, stickers, and bots are distributed. For the crypto market, this situation proved particularly painful. TON blockchain mini-applications, wallets, and collectible usernames—all of this is tied to the t.me domain.

Users typically launch the Telegram custodial wallet via t.me/wallet, allowing them to buy, store, and transfer assets, including USDT, Bitcoin, and Gram. The outage blocked the main user entry point into the ecosystem of the GRAM token, valued at approximately $4.3 billion. This clearly demonstrates the centralized vulnerability of even the most popular crypto infrastructures.

Telegram has already begun to technically bypass the issue: 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 telegram.me is in the same .me zone, so it is not immune to similar action.

My expert conclusion: This incident is a serious wake-up call for the entire industry. Dependence on centralized domain zones (even ones like .me) can at any moment collapse access to a multi-billion dollar ecosystem. For TON and Telegram, this is a signal to accelerate the transition to decentralized naming systems (DNS), such as TON DNS, which do not depend on the decisions of a single registry. Otherwise, such outages will become not the exception, but the new norm.