Registry-level accident: why t.me stopped working and what it threatens the TON ecosystem
A global outage of Telegram's t.me short links has caused significant resonance in the crypto community. The problem was not on the messenger's server side, but at a critically important level — in the domain registry of the .me zone. This directly affected millions of users and, most importantly, undermined the stability of the TON blockchain ecosystem.
The root of the problem lies in the serverHold status assigned to the t.me domain in the .me registry. This status, managed exclusively by the registry (in this case, Identity Digital), completely excludes the domain from the global DNS system. As a result, any request to t.me returns an NXDOMAIN error, making the links non-functional in any browser, regardless of Telegram's own settings.
Telegram's founder, Pavel Durov, publicly appealed to the registry to investigate the situation. Notably, the company did not receive prior notice of such actions.
Technical Details and Possible Causes
WHOIS data confirms: the t.me domain, registered through GoDaddy, received several statuses simultaneously, including serverHold, clientDeleteProhibited, and serverDeleteProhibited. The record update is dated July 13, 2026, which coincides with the time the links were disabled. It is important to note that the domain registration expires only in 2035, ruling out the possibility of a payment lapse. The DNS servers still point to Google's cloud infrastructure, meaning delegation is not broken — the registry simply overrode the resolution at a higher level.
Currently, there are two main versions of what happened. The first links the outage to a sanctions context: on the same day, OFAC published a press release adding the service First VPN Service to the sanctions list, among whose addresses is t.me/FirstVPNService. The second version points to possible pressure related to Pavel Durov's criminal prosecution in France. There is no official confirmation for either of these hypotheses.
Consequences for TON and the Crypto Market
For the crypto industry, this outage was particularly painful. t.me links are the main tool for accessing wallets, mini-apps, and collectible usernames in the TON ecosystem, whose capitalization is estimated in the billions of dollars. Users accustomed to launching the Telegram custodial wallet via t.me/wallet temporarily lost direct access to their assets, including USDT, Bitcoin, and Gram.
Telegram has already begun to circumvent the problem by generating links in the telegram.me format. However, it is worth noting that the backup domain is in the same .me zone and is not protected from similar impacts.
My analysis: This incident is an alarming signal for the entire TON ecosystem. The dependence of critical financial infrastructure on a single domain name managed by a third party creates an unacceptable level of centralization and risk. Restoring the status could take from several hours to several days, but the main lesson is obvious: decentralized projects require decentralized solutions, such as alternative domain name systems (e.g., TON DNS or ENS). For now, the market anxiously awaits official comments from the .me registry and Identity Digital.