The domain used by the messaging app Telegram mysteriously went offline on Monday, with the app's founder Pavel Durov saying in a post on X that the t.me link “stopped working.”
The outage prevented users from accessing shortlinks in the t.me domain, which is used by messaging apps to allow sharing one-click links to join public groups.
According to DomainME, a Montenegro-based domain registration company that manages the top-level domain .me, the domain is now back online.
“The t.me domain is back online. We will be issuing an official statement soon,” DomainME CEO Predrag Lesic said in an email to TechCrunch.
In a post to X in response to Durov, DomainME said Telegram's t.me domain was “on hold for OFAC compliance but is now back online.” OFAC refers to the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes economic sanctions on foreign companies and individuals that pose economic and national security risks to the United States.
Telegram's t.me domain has been taken offline after a “serverhold” block was placed on the domain. A “server hold” usually means that the domain registrar has locked the domain for some reason, and the domain tends to go offline. The “server hold” was lifted early Tuesday morning, according to the site's public internet records.
As noted by technologist Jonah Aragon, the domain was suspended on the same day the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a VPN provider called FirstVPN. Authorities announced that this provider was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. U.S. authorities shut down the site earlier this year.
The Treasury Department's list of sanctions against First VPN, published on Monday, includes a link to the full web address of the VPN provider's public group on Telegram using the shortened t.me domain.
Perhaps the domain registrar has suspended Telegram's entire t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions, rather than restricting specific web addresses that link to Telegram groups on the Treasury Department's sanctions list.
US companies, including domain registrars, can face heavy fines if they fail to comply with US sanctions laws.
Another domain used by Telegram, telegram.me, is not listed in the sanctions file but was operational at the time of this writing.
A Telegram spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
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