Telegram’s t.me domain returned to the internet on Tuesday, July 14, after the registry that controls it confirmed the shortlink domain had been placed on hold “due to the OFAC compliance.” The suspension began Monday, when the .me registry applied a serverHold status that dead-ended every t.me link worldwide for roughly a day. ServerHold is a registry-level status code that removes a domain’s records from the global DNS, so every address under that domain stops resolving anywhere on the internet. The outage did not take down the Telegram app itself, but it broke the invite links, channel URLs, and bot links that route the platform’s roughly one billion monthly users, and it cut off the main consumer gateway into Telegram’s crypto products, including its Wallet and TON-based mini apps.
Key takeaways
- The .me registry placed t.me on serverHold on Monday, July 13. Registry operator DomainME said the hold was applied for OFAC compliance and lifted it early Tuesday.
- The US Treasury sanctioned First VPN, a service tied to ransomware operations, on July 13. The sanctions listing included a t.me address for the VPN’s public Telegram group, and the registry appears to have suspended the entire domain rather than that single link.
- The app kept working during the outage, and Telegram’s backup domain telegram.me stayed online, but t.me links shared across the web failed globally for about a day.
- t.me is the main entry point to Telegram’s Wallet and TON mini apps. Gram, the network’s native token, traded near $1.59 with a market value of about $4.33 billion during the outage.
Published: July 14, 2026, 16:45 UTC
A sanctions listing took down a billion-user domain
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned First VPN on July 13, and its listing pointed to the service’s public Telegram group through a full t.me web address. OFAC said the VPN service was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks, and US authorities had already seized its website in May.
That detail appears to explain the outage. As TechCrunch reported, the registry likely suspended all of t.me to comply with the new sanctions rather than restricting the specific address in the Treasury’s listing. US-facing domain companies that fail to follow sanctions law can face heavy fines, which gives them a reason to over-block first and sort out the details later. Responding to Telegram founder Pavel Durov on X, DomainME said the domain was “on hold due to the OFAC compliance, but it is back online now.”
“The t.me domain is back online. We will be issuing an official statement shortly,” DomainME chief executive Predrag Lešić told TechCrunch on Tuesday.
No warning for crypto’s town square
Telegram received no advance notice before its primary link domain went dark, according to Durov’s public reaction. “Hey @domainME, t.me links stopped working. Can you look into it?” he posted on X, hours after Domain Name Wire first reported the serverHold on Monday. The trade publication noted the domain had not expired, with registration paid through May 2035, which ruled out an administrative lapse.
The .me extension is Montenegro’s country-code domain, operated by DomainME with Identity Digital running the technical backend. A long-standing partnership between the registry and Telegram made t.me the messenger’s shortlink domain of record, the same address format shared billions of times across websites, social posts, and QR codes. That arrangement concentrated a platform’s entire link infrastructure in a single domain controlled by a third party, and Monday showed how quickly it can be switched off. Public DNS records showed t.me resolving normally again by Tuesday afternoon UTC.
What a day offline means for the TON economy
The suspension briefly severed the main on-ramp to Telegram’s financial products. Users typically open Telegram’s custodial Wallet through the t.me/wallet address, mini apps launch through t.me links, and collectible usernames and Telegram Gifts exist as tokenized assets on The Open Network, the layer-1 blockchain Telegram builds on. During the outage, Gram traded near $1.59, down about 2% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization of roughly $4.33 billion, ranking 21st among cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap data cited by Cryptopolitan.
The stakes for that on-ramp keep rising. Telegram’s Wallet is adding tokenized US stocks and ETFs through Kraken and Backed as the company pushes to make the messenger a financial hub. A platform holding user funds and brokering tokenized securities now knows its front door can be closed by a registry acting on a sanctions list, without notice. The episode echoes other compliance-driven cutoffs this month, from Revolut delisting USDT for European users to the broader scramble over US crypto rules as the Senate takes up the Clarity Act, and it lands in the same week the US government moved $288 million in seized crypto to Coinbase Prime.
What to watch next is the registry’s promised statement, which should clarify whether the hold was a legal requirement or an overreaction, and whether Telegram diversifies its link infrastructure so one domain can no longer sever a billion users from its crypto services. Telegram did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Frequently asked questions
Why was Telegram’s t.me domain suspended?
DomainME said the domain was placed on hold for OFAC compliance. The US Treasury sanctioned First VPN on July 13, and its listing included a t.me link to the VPN’s Telegram group. The registry appears to have suspended the whole domain rather than that single address, then restored it Tuesday.
What does serverHold mean for a domain?
ServerHold is a status code that only a domain registry can apply. It removes the domain’s records from the global DNS, so lookups return no address and every website, link, and service on the domain stops working. Registries use it for legal orders, security issues, or compliance holds.
Were funds in Telegram Wallet affected?
No losses were reported. The Telegram app, including Wallet, kept functioning for users already inside it, and the outage broke only the t.me web links used to reach those services. Custody of assets on The Open Network was unchanged, and telegram.me links stayed online throughout the disruption.
