Since early hours of Sunday, Iranian Telegram users were experiencing disrupted communications. The services reportedly were also down in several European countries.
Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov took to Twitter to say that the downtime was due to a technical glitch with Telegram servers.
He tweeted, “Massive overheating in one of the Telegram server clusters may cause some connection issues for European users within the next couple of hours. Apologies for the inconvenience—the problem is being solved.”
Later he added, “Sorry for the constant Telegram crashes, to make it up to our dear community, I’ve hosted a promotion with Ethereum. To join, just send 0.5-10 ETH to the address below and it will immediately send you 5-100 ETH back to your address.”
Some users have speculated that the downtime and the overheating problem were due to a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) on Telegram servers.
Durov and his encrypted messaging service have stepped on many toes around the globe and it is not a far-fetched guess that some agency or another has unleashed a full-scale cyber assault on the Telegram.
Later in the day, some users reported limited access to the services; however, by the time this article went to print the technical problems were not fully resolved.
