In an X post on June 16, 2026, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov alleged that Indian telecom operator Reliance was “sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE)” through a “rogue method called BGP hijacking“. Durov claimed the disruption appeared intentional because Reliance had “ignored multiple reports” about the issue. This comes after the messaging app was restricted in India until the NEET re-examination by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
He further suggested that the alleged sabotage “may be part of a competitive war”, pointing to Reliance’s relationship with Meta. Meta has a 9.99% stake in Jio, which it bought for $5.7 billion in 2020. The companies also announced a joint venture last year to build enterprise AI solutions, as well as a partnership this month to develop an AI data centre in Gujarat.
Additionally, Durov urged network operators to reject “unauthorised BGP announcements” from Reliance’s autonomous system, AS18101, to prevent route hijacks and maintain stable internet access. Calling the alleged conduct an “abuse of global Internet routing”, he also linked it to a “recent lobbying effort to ban Telegram in India”. However, Durov did not publicly provide technical evidence supporting the allegations.
— Pavel Durov (@durov) June 16, 2026Indian telecom Reliance is sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking.
The sabotage seems intentional, as Reliance has ignored multiple reports.
This may be part of a competitive war, as…
What is BGP hijacking? The internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to determine how data travels between thousands of networks worldwide. Through BGP, network operators announce which IP address ranges they can reach, allowing routers to direct traffic to the correct destination. However, the system largely relies on trust and has limited built-in verification of routing announcements.
A BGP hijack occurs when a network announces routes that it is not authorised to advertise, causing internet traffic to follow an unintended path. As a result, users may experience outages, slower connections, or difficulty accessing online services. In some cases, traffic may be redirected; in others, it may simply be dropped or “blackholed”. Importantly, BGP hijacks can result from either deliberate actions or configuration errors. By contrast, a route leak occurs when legitimate routing information spreads beyond its intended scope, often because of a misconfiguration. Because routing announcements can quickly propagate across interconnected networks, both incidents can affect users far beyond the country where they originate.
Was this intentional? Anurag Bhatia, a network researcher and expert on BGP routing, disputed claims that the incident was intentional. Speaking to Medianama, he said: “I think it was a mistake and it doesn’t make any technical sense as an intentional mistake.” He noted that while “BGP hijacks happen”, incidents of this scale are becoming less common because “large backbones as well as IXPs have deployed RPKI RoV to validate origin, and they drop the ones where origin has changed (like this case).”
He also pointed to the absence of any apparent attempt to exploit the routing incident, saying, “No new TLS certificate for ‘telegram.org’ has been issued in the last 3-4 days.” He added that there had been “no visible new certificates since June 11”. “So if the goal was to exploit the hijack to obtain a certificate, that didn’t happen for sure,” he said.
Could have stemmed from attempt to block app in India: Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik, also suggested on X that the incident may have stemmed from an attempt to block Telegram within India rather than a deliberate effort to disrupt access globally. He reported that “AS18101 of India hijacked BGP routes belonging to Telegram”, but noted that the incident saw “limited propagation due to route filtering” and that “RPKI ROV helped to limit the impact”.
Madory compared the incident to Iraq’s 2023 Telegram block, where “Iraq’s international gateway hijacked Telegram’s routes to block the app but also leaked the hijacked routes.” He added: “Like the case of Iraq, this was likely an attempt to block Telegram within India that leaked out a small amount.”
Similarly, Pranesh Prakash, a technology law and policy researcher, argued that the incident appeared to be a misconfiguration rather than a deliberate attack. In a thread on X, he wrote that Reliance was “likely trying to redirect Telegram traffic internally within India to comply with the section 69A blocking order, but misconfigured their filters, leaking the hijack to the global internet.”
Prakash further stated: “I do not agree with Durov. He thinks the BGP hijacking was intentional, and I think it highly unlikely to be intentional; it was incompetence. The bar for this being intentional is really high. So far I’ve seen zero evidence.”
Current status of Telegram in India: MediaNama found that Telegram stopped working yesterday evening, with previously installed apps unable to connect to the internet. The app has also been removed from both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
Messages sent while connected through a VPN or proxy were successfully delivered, with recipients receiving notifications even without using a VPN. However, chat histories and messages disappeared from the app until both users reconnected through a VPN.
Questions sent to Reliance: MediaNama has sent the following questions to Reliance seeking clarification on the allegations:
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