Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended

206 points116 comments3 hours ago
sebastiennight

Of course we launched our Telegram channel just this weekend, so I am feeling pretty happy that I enforced a 15-year old SOP that says "never email links to 3rd-party domains ; always use a redirect"...

Swapping the redirect now for telegram.me, which hopefully won't go down simultaneously

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RJSquirel

I can't believe they use GoDaddy as a registrar.

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water-data-dude

You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.

The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:

"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."

Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.

https://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

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anigbrowl

Telegram is currently the target of legal/regulatory investigations by Russia (alleged extremism), France (likewise), and India (alleged facilitation of national exam leaking/cheating). I'm guessing the latter since it's the most recent and arguably has the most fiscal heft.

Also very surprised to see Telegram was reliant on GoDaddy, notorious for its lack of transparency.

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haskman

We only recently started moving the Functional Programming India community from Telegram to Zulip. That decision is looking better and better!

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markasoftware

Its serverHold which means the .me registry took this action, not the registrar (GoDaddy).

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ventegus

I went here for an IP to write in /etc/hosts and no one has posted it yet :(

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codedude64

I don't understand I visited the whois site and it seems all it's fine but I don't know if this match with the following cases.

- The site was suspended but now it's ok - The site was not suspended - There is other information about telegram suspended

namegulf

Yeah,a serverHold is placed by the Registrar.

It could be for a lot of reasons:

- spam, phishing or malware distribution

- contact verification issues

- trademark, copyright or cybersquatting legal issues

- or sometimes even errors or registrar transfer issues

It is a valuable and important domain for TG, most likely they'll resolve it soon

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pKropotkin

NEVER use godaddy!

bryant

They're in a position to get their own TLD (e.g .tgrm - edited from .tg); they should probably do this and run their own supporting infrastructure for it at this point.

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Tiberium

Direct link to the registry to verify the domain status (JSON): https://rdap.identitydigital.services/rdap/domain/t.me, Ctrl+F for "server hold"

dgellow

Seems to be working fine? What does suspended imply here?

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yakohere

I stored all of my user images links with t.me and on my telegram mini app all users profile don't show the image. Switching to telegram.me

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NDlurker

Any explanation?

orliesaurus

centralized dns is always going to give some people headaches, but works for 99.9% of the rest of the people

zuzululu

i really hope this is it from telegram. its downright causing havoc in countries without the jurisdictional power like korea and japan which have seen insane rise in drug related crime especially in japan they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators running human cell crime ops

withinrafael

Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?

monkeywork

someone enforcing a min character policy on them?

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qurren

Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.

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shishcat

serverHold means like "suspicious activity, domain is administratively held and taken off dns"

EGreg

This is what the problem is with DNS.

petcat

Telegram was always shady as hell.