Messaging app Telegram suffered a major outage on October 3, leaving users around the world, including Ukraine, Germany and Poland, unable to access the service.
Telegram, a popular messaging app favored by the cryptocurrency community, suffered a major outage on the morning of October 3, 2024, affecting millions of users around the world. According to data from Downdetector, users began reporting issues around 10:30 a.m. UTC, with issues continuing throughout the day. Major issues reported included the inability to send and receive messages and general connectivity issues.
The issue affected users in multiple countries, including Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany. Report also confirmed the severity of the issue, saying it began at around 10:22 a.m. Many users expressed their frustration on Reddit and other social media.
“In Germany, the app is not working properly. It seems to be unable to connect to the server as the chats are still visible but no new messages are being loaded,” one German user Chia . “It has been down for about an hour,” another user said, underscoring the scale of the problem.
Telegram silent on user concerns
Despite the widespread nature of the incident, neither Telegram nor CEO Pavel Durov has yet issued any official response. The company’s silence has left many users confused and worried.
The outage follows a number of smaller incidents on October 2 and earlier outages in 2024. According to Downdetector, Telegram experienced a major outage in June that lasted more than an hour, and another outage that lasted nearly two hours in April. Despite the increasingly frequent outages, Telegram has yet to provide an explanation or a solution.
The timing of the incident is also notable, coming just a day after CEO Pavel Durov made controversial comments about Telegram’s cooperation with law enforcement. On October 2, Durov suggested that the platform had been disclosing the IP addresses of criminals to law enforcement since 2018, sparking a debate about user privacy and security.
Durov was charged by French prosecutors with six counts of illegal activity on the messaging platform in late August. The ongoing investigation may have added to Telegram's challenges, although there has been no official connection between the investigation and the service outage.
