The world has faced a large-scale incident: short Telegram links in the t.me format have stopped opening in browsers worldwide. At the same time, the application itself, as well as the backup domains telegram.me and telegram.org, are operating normally. The problem exclusively affected web redirects, but its consequences turned out to be much deeper than they seem at first glance.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov himself publicly drew attention to the malfunction, requesting an investigation from the administration of the .me domain zone. However, it appears that the messenger's team did not receive prior notification of such actions from the registry.

Technical Details: What Exactly Happened

The cause of the outage lies not in Telegram's infrastructure, but at the domain registry level. The domain t.me received the status serverHold in the .me zone registry. This status completely excludes the domain from global DNS resolution, regardless of the registrar's or DNS provider's settings. In practice, this means any request to the domain returns an NXDOMAIN error — the internet reports that the address does not exist.

Technical WHOIS records capture the moment of the change. The domain now carries eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update date of July 13, 2026. It is important to emphasize: serverHold is an EPP code that can only be set by the domain registry. In this case, it is the .me registry managed by Identity Digital, and its decision takes precedence over any registrar settings.

The domain registration parameters confirm that the issue is not related to payment expiration: the domain is registered until 2035, and the name servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure. That is, DNS delegation is not broken — the registry simply overrode resolution at a higher level.

Possible Causes and Context

There are no official statements yet from Telegram, the .me registry, or Identity Digital. Nevertheless, two main versions are circulating in the industry:

  • Sanctions Context: According to several reports, the registry placed the domain in serverHold due to compliance requirements related to 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. There is no direct official link between the sanctions and the registry's action yet, but the coincidence of dates looks more than suspicious.
  • Situation with Durov: The suspension coincided with a period of 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 block to a specific court proceeding has been presented.

Consequences for the Telegram and TON Ecosystem

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

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

Further developments depend on the registry. Restoration usually requires the registrant or registrar to resolve the underlying claim before the status is lifted. Based on industry practice, this process can take from several hours to several days.

My analysis: This incident is a warning signal for the entire industry. It demonstrates the vulnerability of centralized entry points into decentralized ecosystems. TON's dependence on a single domain name managed by a third-party registry creates a critical single point of failure risk. The TON community should seriously consider decentralized alternatives, such as blockchain-based naming systems, to avoid similar scenarios in the future.