Telegram shortlinks disappear worldwide

Published On 18 Jul, 2026
telegram-shortlinks-disappear-worldwide

A technical failure did not cause this widespread outage. Instead, it resulted from an unexpected consequence of a United States government effort to disrupt a cybercriminal proxy network.

On July 13, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on the administrators of First VPN Service (1VPNS), aiming to disrupt infrastructure used by ransomware groups. First VPN had promoted itself as offering complete anonymity, which drew the attention of law enforcement agencies.

As part of these sanctions, the Treasury released a list of related web addresses. Among them was a link to First VPN’s public support channel on Telegram.

Domain registrars are required to follow international regulations. Identity Digital, which oversees the technical operations for the .me domain, confirmed that the t.me domain was blocked following a request from OFAC.

However, registries cannot selectively turn off a specific channel path; consequently, the Montenegro-based registry Domain.Me applied a “serverHold” status to Telegram’s entire t.me domain, effectively erasing it from the global Domain Name System (DNS).