Telegram Is Banned in India, Deleted from App Stores, Suffered a Global Outage

The Indian government ordered a temporary ban on Telegram due to mass leaks of NEET-UG exam questions. However, a local telecom‘s attempt to restrict access led to interceptions far beyond the country. Editors at @tginfo explain how local censorship turned into a global outage.

What Happened in India

The formal reason for the ban was leaked questions for the national medical exam in Telegram channels. Currently, the official Telegram client has been removed from the Indian App Store and Google Play storefronts.

Pavel Durov points out that this move punishes 150 million users in India, while the leaks simply migrated to a different app, and that Telegram cooperated with regulators by deleting “hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India”. The CEO also adds that the messenger team has “been making the ‘edited’ label more visible to prevent backdating scams”, although it is not clear whether this change hasn't shipped yet or is some local change that our editors couldn‘t confirm independently. The “edited” indicator changes are said to be done to fight backdating scams.

For context, India is one of the biggest Telegram markets. The Indian government tried to pressure Telegram before: in 2022, a court demanded the disclosure of pirate channel owners‘ personal data. At that time, Telegram only complied on paper, stating that it didn‘t store the requested data on its servers. It is clear that this time the government is trying to act with more force.

From a Local Ban to a Global Outage

Trying to restrict Telegram inside the country, an Indian telecom company used a BGP routing hijacking trick.

• The Internet is made up of many interconnected networks that tell each other the data paths using the BGP protocol.
• An Indian telecom company announced to the whole world that it owns Telegram's IP addresses, forcing part of the global traffic to be sent through the false route, which blocks access to the messenger.
• Since many service providers around the world still don‘t verify the authenticity of the routes they receive, the false routes spread around the globe.

As a result, connectivity issues could be observed even outside India, including regions like the UAE. Similar incidents happened before: for example, in 2023, the Iraqi government used a similar trick to ban Telegram.

Industry experts point out that the Indian telecom even got into a brief network war with Telegram, in which one company tried to overwrite the opponent‘s routing directions. Pavel Durov announced that Reliance stopped malicious routing four hours after his post.

Erroneous Accusations Against Meta Trying to Blame for All Their Problems

Pavel Durov called the service provider‘s actions intentional sabotage and assumed that it might be part of the competitive war that WhatsApp is leading against Telegram, based on a claim that Reliance is partially owned by Meta (parent company of WhatsApp and Facebook*).

Despite this, community and media research shows that Pavel Durov confused two companies. The network system that was hijacking the traffic is owned by Reliance Communications, an old telecom asset midway through bankruptcy, while Meta invested in a completely unrelated company — Jio Platforms (which also owns Reliance Jio, a large Indian service provider).

The theory about WhatsApp‘s corporate conspiracy couldn‘t be backed by any technical data. It is likely that the global traffic hijacking was caused by incompetence among the engineers at the Indian company responsible for configuring the hardware to block Telegram. It is not the first time that Pavel Durov has publicly accused WhatsApp of attacking Telegram, explaining unfavorable events with conspiracy theories.

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