Telegram’s t.me shortlink domain went offline on Monday, July 14, 2026, and was restored the following day after the Montenegro-based domain registrar DomainME placed it on hold for U.S. sanctions compliance reasons.
The outage blocked users from accessing t.me links, which Telegram uses to let people share one-click links for joining public groups. Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov acknowledged the problem in a post on X, saying that t.me links had “stopped working.”
“The t.me domain is back online. We will be issuing an official statement shortly,” DomainME CEO Predrag Lešić told TechCrunch in an email. In a separate post on X, DomainME stated the domain had been “on hold due to OFAC compliance” before being restored.
OFAC — the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — imposes economic sanctions on overseas companies and individuals deemed to pose a national security risk to the United States. A “serverhold” block, which typically locks a domain offline, was placed on t.me and lifted early Tuesday, according to public internet records.
The suspension coincided with the U.S. Treasury imposing sanctions on a VPN provider called First VPN, which authorities said was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. The Treasury’s sanctions listing for First VPN, published Monday, contained a full t.me web address linking to the VPN provider’s public Telegram group. Technologist Jonah Aragon noted the timing of the two events.
It appears DomainME suspended the entire t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions listing, rather than blocking only the specific Telegram group address cited in the filing. U.S. companies, including domain registrars, can face heavy fines for failing to adhere to U.S. sanctions laws.
Telegram’s other domain, telegram.me, was not listed in the sanctions file and remained operational throughout the outage. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: TechCrunch