Telegram shortlinks restored after US sanctions compliance block

Telegram’s shortlink domain, t.me, mysteriously dropped offline on Monday, cutting off the shortlinks the messaging app uses to share public groups. Founder Pavel Durov said in an X post that t.me links had stopped working. The domain has since been restored, according to Montenegro-based 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.

DomainME said the domain had been placed on hold due to compliance with OFAC — the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes economic sanctions on overseas companies and individuals — but was back online. The outage followed a “serverhold” block, a registrar-level lock that typically means the domain registrar has locked the domain, which tends to knock it offline. The serverhold block on t.me was lifted early on Tuesday. U.S. companies, including domain registrars, that do not adhere to U.S. sanctions laws can face heavy fines.

As noted by technologist Jonah Aragon, the domain was suspended the same day the U.S. Treasury published its sanctions listing for First VPN, a VPN provider used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. The listing contains a link to the VPN provider’s public group on Telegram, using the shortened t.me address that Telegram relies on for the one-click links that let users join public groups. It’s likely that the registrar suspended Telegram’s entire t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions, rather than restricting the specific web address named in the listing. Another domain used by Telegram, telegram.me, was operational at the time of writing.

Why it matters

The episode shows how overseas service providers can aggressively over-comply with U.S. sanctions rules to avoid heavy fines, even when doing so temporarily disrupts infrastructure that a global platform like Telegram depends on.