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Telegram Messengers users in some parts of the world struggled to exchange messages through the service today. The issues were caused by a distributed denial of service attack targeting Telegram servers.
The service outage affected users mainly in South America and North America, although connection issues are also present in other parts of the world.
In an announcement on Twitter, Telegram informed that its servers are today the target of a DDoS attack deployed by a network of compromised computers.
We are currently undergoing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users in other countries may experience connection issues.
– Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
The botnet sent so much unnecessary traffic to Telegram servers that they could no longer handle requests from legitimate users, resulting in unstable connections.
According to Failure detector, a website that tracks disruptions and outages affecting various digital services in real time, the hot spots of the impact of DDoS attacks were on the east coast of the Americas, UK, Netherlands, Germany , Ukraine, Russia and China.
However, users in other places were also affected as some people in Australia reported issues loading video content.
While some users speculated who could be behind the attack saying it could be the work of Brazilian hackers, the Russian government or Chinese, Telegram clarified that the main characteristic of a botnet is that it is formed compromised computers located anywhere in the world.
Even if they were from a specific region, that doesn’t necessarily indicate that the attacker is from that location as well. In addition, there are DDoS services that praise the power of botnets, so that anyone in the world can deploy an attack against a target.
After explaining in ELI5 As to what a DDoS attack is and the effect it has, Telegram has assured its users that their data remains safe.
There’s a silver lining: all of those lemmings are there just to overload the servers with extra work – they can’t take your BigMac and your Coke. Your data is safe.
– Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019
At the moment, the situation is stable and users should no longer experience any issues while using the Telegram messaging service.
In March 2018, Telegram boasted of serving a base of 200 million active users, and increasingly on the platform, as other instant messaging alternatives suffered from connection issues.
For example, the founder of the Telegram service, Pavel Durov, announcement in March 2019 that three million registered on the platform in 24 hours. The timing of the statement coincided with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outages.
Update [06.13.2019]: Pavel Durov said on Twitter that the attacking IP addresses were primarily from China.
“Historically, all of the state actor-sized (200-400 Gb / s waste) DDoS we have experienced coincided in time with the protests in Hong Kong (contact details on @telegram). This case was not an exception “, noted The founder of Telegram.
For the background, residents of Hong Kong have been protesting since Sunday against a controversial extradition bill that would send suspects to mainland China for trial. A vote on the bill was slated for Wednesday, but mass protests forced the postponement until Friday. It looks like a vote won’t take place tomorrow either, as the protests have forced the government and legislative buildings to close.
Protest leaders call for another protest in Hong Kong on Sunday.
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