{"id":10533,"date":"2026-08-19T20:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T00:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/?p=10533"},"modified":"2026-08-19T18:36:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T22:36:52","slug":"telegram-wants-its-own-domain-after-19-hour-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/telegram-wants-its-own-domain-after-19-hour-outage\/","title":{"rendered":"Telegram wants its own domain after 19 hour outage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https:\/\/web.telegram.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Telegram<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">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 <a href=\"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/icanns-new-domain-ending-window-closes-august-12-with-227k-entry-fee\/\">ICANN<\/a> approves the bid, Durov says a billion users could eventually claim their own second-level domains hosted directly through Telegram.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">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&#8217;s platform rather than one the company owned.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The .me registry, run by a company called doMEn, a partnership between <a href=\"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/godaddy-tells-indian-court-privacy-order-could-push-registrars-out\/\">GoDaddy<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Telegram isn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/icann-opens-narrow-door-for-blockchain-names-to-join-the-real-internet\/\">ICANN&#8217;s 2026 rules<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Even owning a registry wouldn&#8217;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&#8217;t move outside the same legal system that triggered the outage in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20624,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7809,7811,285,7810,7812,2145],"class_list":["post-10533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gram-domain","tag-domain-registry-ownership","tag-icann","tag-new-tld-applications","tag-ofac-sanctions-outage","tag-telegram"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Telegram wants its own domain after 19 hour outage - Web Hosting News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hostingdiscussion.com\/news\/telegram-wants-its-own-domain-after-19-hour-outage\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Telegram wants its own domain after 19 hour outage - Web Hosting News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Telegram went dark for nineteen hours in July, and the reason had nothing to do with Telegram itself. 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