Telegram’s shortlink domain is back online after day-long suspension

A domain used by the messaging app Telegram mysteriously dropped offline on Monday, with the app’s founder, Pavel Durov, saying in an X post that t.me links had “stopped working.”

The outage prevented users from accessing the t.me domain shortlink, used by the messaging app to allow users to share one-click links for joining public groups.

The domain is now back online, according to the Montenegro-based domain registrar DomainME, which manages the .me top-level domain.

“The t.me domain is back online. We will be issuing an official statement shortly,” said Predrag Lešić, the chief executive of DomainME, in an email to TechCrunch.

In a post on X responding to Durov, DomainME said that Telegram’s t.me domain was “on hold due to the OFAC compliance, but it is back online now.” OFAC refers to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes economic sanctions on overseas companies and individuals who pose economic national security risk to the United States.

Telegram’s t.me domain went offline after a “serverhold” block was put on the domain. A “serverhold” typically means that the domain registrar locked the domain for some reason, which tends to knock the domain offline. The “serverhold” was lifted early on Tuesday, per the site’s public internet records.

As noted by technologist Jonah Aragon, the domain was suspended on the same day that the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on a VPN provider called First VPN, which authorities said was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. U.S. authorities shut down the site earlier this year. 

The Treasury’s sanctions listing for First VPN, published Monday, contains a link to the full web address of the VPN provider’s public group on Telegram using the shortened t.me domain.

It’s likely that the domain registrar suspended Telegram’s entire t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions, rather than restricting the specific web address that links to the Telegram group in the Treasury’s sanctions listing.

U.S. companies, including domain registrars, that do not adhere to U.S. sanctions laws can face heavy fines.

Another domain used by Telegram, telegram.me, was not listed in the sanctions file and was operational at the time of writing.

A spokesperson for Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.