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Telegram’s t.me Links Go Dark Worldwide After DNS Hold
Millions of links became unusable in just a few hours: that’s what happened to Telegram. Since July 13, 2026, the short address t.me has stopped working after being placed on serverHold. Even though Telegram itself is still operating, all t.me links pointing to an account, channel, or group no longer open. Here’s what we know so far.
A registry-level status, and t.me disappears from DNS
Telegram relies on the t.me domain for its short links. A username is written as t.me/username, a channel as t.me/channelname, and so on. It is this domain, and this domain alone, that has been affected. But given how important it is, the disruption is significant for users.
According to WHOIS data, relayed notably by Domain Name Wire, t.me now shows the serverHold status. What does that mean? It means the domain is removed from global DNS resolution. When a browser tries to reach t.me, it gets an NXDOMAIN response, as if the address simply did not exist. Could Pavel Durov have forgotten to renew the domain name? Probably not.
The current block is being enforced at the registry level, not at the registrar level. The registrar for t.me is GoDaddy, and it could only have applied a clientHold. The serverHold status, on the other hand, falls under the .me registry, the commercially operated country-code extension for Montenegro. The registry is managed by the Montenegrin company doMEn.
At the moment, t.me does not work, while telegram.me still does. The domain is nevertheless properly registered, with an expiration date set to 2035, which rules out the earlier hypothesis.
No explanation yet
For now, no one has explained why this decision was made. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder and CEO, personally reacted on X: "Hi @domainME, the http://t.me link has stopped working. Could you check it?", he wrote. The tone suggests Telegram may not have been warned in advance, although nothing officially confirms that.
A serverHold status can be applied for a variety of reasons: legal dispute, regulatory compliance, enforcement of an internal registry rule, or even a technical error. But for now, we do not know. What we do know is that tensions between Telegram and the authorities are often high.
More to come.
