All Telegram servers are down | Hacker News Reader

All Telegram servers are down

telegram.org

105 pointserohead40 comments

They are not down [1]. But it does look like a lot of Europe is affected [2] and if you stay on that page. It looks like the attack is growing. Top hits are "Ukraine, Germany, Russia".

Also, the OP link provides ZERO information on the claim. Mods could use my [2] link for the OP link. As it does seem to be happening.

[1] - https://twitter.com/telegram/with_replies

[2] - https://outage.report/telegram

Edited: for formatting and there does seem to be an attack growing. I also petition the mods to update the link to something more informative.

Some of the comments on your second link say their VPN is also down. I wonder if it's some outage in a popular datacentre or backbone.

Is there a reason this is on the front page other than for it being seemingly down? There is no information in the link.

I am scratching my head as to why we are all gathered here. What am I missing?

Maybe I am just too used to software outages?

There's a front page story every time google, apple or Amazon are down. I'm not sure telegram warrants the same publicity but it doesn't seem completely inappropriate.

The question is, why is the link to telegram's homepage? It's not down, and has 0 information on what is happening.

Maybe someone is doing a social experiment to see how many HNers read before voting?

Usually that at least comes with a status page or a news article about the impact or something. This just links the product.

I've honestly never understood why these sorts of posts (even for those larger companies with services everyone relies on) get so much traction on HN. I can very easily tell for myself when a site is down, and it's not hard to find most companies' service status page. Sure, if a few days later we get an interesting/detailed post-mortem from the company, I'd find that interesting, but "X is down" does not tickle me intellectually at all, and just wastes a slot on the front page. The inevitable speculation as to whether it was a bad deploy, a bad configuration update, a DDoS attack, whatever, is just not really interesting, though I guess (IMO unfortunately) enough people here find it interesting.

Of course, I'm here commenting, so somehow I got enticed to click through to the comments, so who knows what that says about me...

A bunch of people use telegram bots as a means of alerting themselves/other users (instead of emails and/or sms messages).

The production server might have a 150 load, with swap 99% full and 0 disk space left right now, and you wouldn't get any alerts from the monitoring software, because telegram is down, and it has "never happened before".

Following the events outage is usually a pretty interesting drama, to me.

Telegram is used by enough furries that the Telegram Twitter account jokes about it, and a lot of furries are in tech.

A potential major attack on an encrypted messaging service would be newsworthy to me, but there needs to be some info on what happened

Telegram messenger is encrypted? That's news to me.

There's an encrypted mode but it's missing many features and in my experience most people use it rarely or never. The default mode is not e2e encrypted.

It's as usable (or better) as Signal is, though.

The encryption ?

Yes, the encrypted mode.

It uses standard transport encryption for all communication. End to End encryption is available for direct messages. It isn't used for groups, where real E2E is very difficult and complex and AFAIK nobody does it well, and channels, where it doesn't seem to have much point.

Probably also because of geopolitical aspect, given Telegram's rocky past with Russian government.

My theory is: When something is down, people may be upvoting to show sympathy / trying to bring it up again. Who knows

Has been down for me in Berlin, Germany, for an hour or so.

Trying to log in via web gives me this error:

Method: auth.sendCode Result: {"_":"rpc_error","error_code":420,"error_message":"FLOOD_WAIT_438"}

Maybe a localized DDoS attack?

(Username) Do you really live in a bunker?

No, sadly I do not.

420? Not a http status code I know of

Twitter apparently returns a “420 Enhance your calm” error when you exceed their rate limiting. It’s not an official http code, though.

me finding this thread from https://t.me/news_ycombinator

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is an interesting practical exercise. We generally expect our Web services to be available all the time.

What else broke down due to Telegram being offline? Are there any fallbacks?

Hmmmm they're not ALL down. Working just fine for me in India and my friends in the US.

Localized outage? Everything's working fine for me, has been all day.

In UK atm, there was a markedly slow startup / refresh but looks like it's working (well, i guess - all my contacts are asleep, lol).

(Seems fine now.)

The web does, but I still can't connect on any device.

Uk clients not working. Haven’t tested web though...

I'm fine in the UK now

Doesn't work on Android, however Desktop App seems unaffected. Germany btw

How am I supposed to buy my drugs now?!

- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-telegram-exclusi...

- https://www.gatewayhouse.in/telegram-protests/

Who uses Telegram?

Hundreds of millions of people, currently growing by 10 million per week.

After ~30 minutes of "connecting..." I restarted Telegram (Linux app), won't log me in, says "Too many tries, please try again later". Hope they'll reset try counters when they are back online.

I appreciate Telegram's latest features and understand that stuff happens when you change things... hope they'll fix it soon.

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