Telegram went dark for nineteen hours in July, and the reason had nothing to do with Telegram itself. One channel address, buried inside a US sanctions filing against a Ukrainian VPN seller, was enough to knock every t.me link offline at once.
Founder Pavel Durov confirmed on August 18 that Telegram has now applied to run its own top-level domain, .gram, which would let users register addresses like yourname.gram instead of relying on t.me. If If ICANN approves the bid, Durov says a billion users could eventually claim their own second-level domains hosted directly through Telegram.
The outage that triggered this traces back to a single Treasury designation on July 13. OFAC sanctioned First VPN Service, a Ukraine-based provider selling to ransomware groups, and attached five web identifiers to the listing. The sanctioned company controlled four of those domains outright. The fifth was t.me/FirstVPNService, a page sitting on Telegram’s platform rather than one the company owned.
The .me registry, run by a company called doMEn, a partnership between GoDaddy and Identity Digital, placed the entire t.me domain on serverHold in response. That single move erased every Telegram link built on it: channels, usernames, invite codes, bots, mini apps, even TON wallet addresses formatted as t.me links. Service returned about nineteen hours later.
Telegram isn’t the only company after .gram, though. Link Freedom Group, an infrastructure firm built on the .link registry, published a list of 316 strings it applied for this round, and .gram sits on it, filed under lifestyle for uses like photo.gram and dia.gram, with no connection to Telegram at all.
ICANN’s 2026 rules ban private deals to settle a naming collision like this. The dispute now has to go through Community Priority Evaluation or a public auction, and neither company has said whether it named a fallback string in case it loses.
Even owning a registry wouldn’t fully solve what happened to Telegram. A generic top-level domain still runs under contract with ICANN, a US-based organization that American law reaches directly. The decision just moves to a different desk. It doesn’t move outside the same legal system that triggered the outage in the first place.
