<p>t.me outage: global failure of Telegram short links and its impact on the TON ecosystem</p>

The world has faced an unexpected and large-scale incident: Telegram short links in the t.me format have stopped opening in browsers worldwide. At the same time, the Telegram application itself, as well as the backup domains telegram.me and telegram.org, are operating normally. The problem has exclusively affected web transitions via short links, indicating a specific nature of the outage.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly drew attention to the malfunction, directly addressing the .me domain zone registry in his X account with a request to look into the situation. Notably, it appears the company did not receive prior notification about the registry's actions.

What exactly happened: a technical breakdown

The cause of the outage lies not in Telegram's infrastructure, but at the domain registry level. The domain t.me has 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 t.me domain now returns an NXDOMAIN error — the internet reports that the address does not exist. Consequently, the link stops working in any browser, network, and geographic location.

Technical WHOIS records capture the moment of the change. The domain now carries eight status flags, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited, with an update timestamp of 2026-07-13T19:24:55Z. It is important to emphasize: serverHold is an EPP status code that can only be set by the domain registry (in this case, the .me registry managed by Identity Digital), and it takes precedence over any registrar settings.

Domain registration data:

The long expiration date rules out non-payment of renewal as a cause of the outage. The name servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure, meaning DNS delegation is not broken — the registry overrode resolution at a higher level.

The scale of the potential risk extends beyond Telegram alone. The .me registry also serves short links for PayPal, WordPress, and the family of applications from Meta, recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.

Possible causes and context

There is no official explanation. Neither Telegram, nor the .me registry, nor Identity Digital have issued a statement. serverHold, unlike clientHold, is reserved for registry-level actions — such as fraud investigations, security issues, legal disputes, or abuse flags.

Two versions have emerged on social media, neither of which is officially confirmed:

• The first links the shutdown to a sanctions context: the registry placed the domain in serverHold due to compliance requirements related to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It was separately noted that on the same day, July 13, OFAC published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list, and among the addresses listed under it is t.me/FirstVPNService. However, there is no official confirmation of a connection between the OFAC sanctions and the registry's action regarding t.me.
• The second line is related to Durov's personal situation. The suspension coincided with a period of pressure on 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. However, no evidence has been presented linking the suspension to any specific legal proceeding or regulatory action.

Telegram's reaction and consequences for TON

The platform has already begun to technically circumvent the problem. The application updated its link-sharing mechanism: when copying links to chats, channels, or profiles, URLs in the telegram.me format are now generated instead of the standard t.me. It is worth considering that the backup domain telegram.me is in the same .me zone, and therefore is not necessarily protected from a similar action.

The scale of the outage is significant: t.me is the main 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 TON token ecosystem, 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 Toncoin.

Further developments depend on the registry. Restoration usually requires the registrant or registrar to resolve the underlying claim of the registry before the status is lifted, and judging by industry practice, this process can take from several hours to several days depending on the nature of the problem. At the time of publication, the status has not been lifted, and there are still no official comments.

Expert opinion: This incident is a wake-up call for the entire ecosystem tied to centralized domain names. For TON, which positions itself as a decentralized platform, dependence on a single DNS registry is a critical vulnerability. I think we will see an acceleration in the development of alternative solutions, such as decentralized domains (e.g., TON DNS), to reduce such risks in the future.