On the evening of July 13, t.me short links leading to Telegram content stopped opening in browsers worldwide. This was reported by the outlet Kod Durova. By the afternoon of July 14, those addresses were working again.
What happened
The disruption began after the t.me domain received the serverHold status. That means the operator of Montenegro’s national .ME domain zone disconnected the address from the DNS system, causing the short links to stop resolving in browsers.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov appealed to the domain registrar on X, asking it to look into the problem.
“Hey, @domainME, http://t.me links stopped working. Please look into what’s going on.”
How the block was explained
Only after about 12 hours did representatives of the .ME domain zone reply to Durov. According to them, the short links were unavailable because of a need to comply with US sanctions requirements.
At the same time, the report cites no information about any US sanctions against Telegram itself or its short domain. However, on July 13 the United States imposed restrictions on the Ukrainian VPN service FirstVPN and its administrator.
Jona Aragon, a contributor to the digital security and privacy project Privacy Guides, suggested that the cause may have been an overly broad application of sanctions. In that case, not only a link to the sanctioned VPN service’s Telegram channel, but the entire t.me domain, may have been affected.