Telegram's core t.me links went dark worldwide today, then came back a few hours later

[StringTheory97]

Every Telegram link on the internet stopped working, with no warning

Telegram's t.me short link domain, the address behind every channel invite, bot link, and shared profile, was placed on serverHold status by the .me registry on July 13, dropping it from the global domain name system and dead ending every t.me link worldwide. A serverHold is a registry level suspension, meaning it does not matter how healthy Telegram's own servers are, browsers everywhere simply lose the ability to translate t.me into an actual address

Founder Pavel Durov appeared to learn about it in real time, posting on X asking the registry directly, hey domainME, t.me links stopped working, can you look into it. Domain records showed the registration was paid up through 2035, ruling out a simple lapse, and the outage did not affect the Telegram app itself, existing chats, channels and calls kept working normally, this was purely a browser facing link problem

The likely cause, and the resolution

Speculation initially ranged from a legal dispute to a policy fight to plain administrative error, with some pointing to Durov's ongoing legal situation in France, where he was reportedly questioned by investigators for a fourth time just last week. By the time the domain came back online a few hours later, the registry operator DomainME confirmed the real reason directly to TechCrunch, the domain had been placed on hold due to OFAC compliance, a reference to the US Treasury's sanctions enforcement arm, and it was restored once that was resolved

Why this mattered beyond mild annoyance

The .me top level domain is Montenegro's country code extension, and it is used well beyond Telegram, PayPal, WordPress, and Meta's own family of apps all lean on .me shortlinks too, so a registry level suspension is a genuinely different kind of failure than a normal outage, it sits above the level any individual company can fix on their own. For a platform with roughly a billion monthly active users that leans on t.me links for onboarding, trading bot coordination, and crypto project announcements, even a few hours of broken links was enough to ripple through crypto community coordination specifically, since Telegram is effectively crypto's default town square

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