If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the full story about the US agencies’ attempts to infiltrate Telegram last year: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine

It tells how the FBI tried to influence me and bribe our engineer in May 2016 to make Telegram less secure. Luckily, since neither of us are US citizens, we could afford to refuse their offers and I was able to tell the public about these attempts. If we were American citizens, the FBI would have likely tried to silence us using a legal procedure called a "gag order" – when the US authorities can not only demand that you do something (like plant a backdoor into your app), but also prohibit you from telling the public about it (otherwise you can end up in jail).

That whole story made me ask myself this question: if our team experienced such pressure during just one week’s trip to America, what kind of pressure are US-based tech companies facing every day? How can a privacy oriented company permanently operate from America? We can hope that the open US legal system would defend them, but due to the secrecy of these “gag orders” we would never even know if things went wrong. And unfortunately, Edward Snowden’s revelations confirm some of the worst fears.

The article also provides facts that confirm something that I always feared could be true – that some of the famous and most vocal US-based influencers within the cryptography world are sponsored by the US government to push the agenda of its agencies. Some past cases are widely known (like NSA infiltrating RSA), but it looks like the level of collaboration between US agencies and these influential “privacy advocates” is much deeper.

All of this makes protecting privacy really hard, particularly considering the fact that Google and Apple – the two companies which we are dependent on for mobile operating systems – are based in the US. I don't see any easy recipe or solution to fix this. I wish one day huge companies like Apple and Google can become independent of any government that distort the mission of their founders (maybe start their own countries?).

Until then, I’ll continue doing my part building Telegram and protecting our users, even if that will require speaking out under gag orders. I know this can probably get me into trouble some day, as it did in the past when I was living in Russia. But this is the only way I can imagine myself going forward, so I don't have and won’t have any regrets. It’s all worth it because of you guys – the millions of users who entrusted their private data to Telegram.

On the September 13th Connection Issues

Yesterday Telegram experienced something extraordinary. At 17:45 UTC there was an immense spike in user activity on Telegram that exceeded our peak load by 5 times.

Telegram is different from most other internet services in that we use a distributed server infrastructure, so peak loads cannot make the whole of Telegram go down. However, if one of the Telegram clusters is severely affected, a part of our users can experience difficulties sending and receiving messages.

This is exactly what happened yesterday. Due to the spike, one of the Telegram server clusters went down in part and approximately 15% of the users who were online at the time experienced connection issues from 17:45 to 18:10. The issues were partially fixed at 18:10, but about 11% of online users could still face slow or no performance until 19:00 when the problem was permanently fixed.

The regions that were most affected are Germany, Iraq and the CIS – most notably, Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. We briefly commented on the situation via Twitter, but I’d like to tell more extensively about it here.

1. First of all, we are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. The cluster that went down hasn’t had any issues for a few years now, so I can imagine the shock of the users affected by yesterday’s downtime. We understand that you use Telegram constantly for work and leisure, and that we must be online 100% of the time. We take yesterday’s issues very seriously.

2. Secondly, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, we identified the cause of the problem and have eliminated the bottlenecks in our infrastructure that caused the downtime. We think that x5 peak load spikes won’t be a problem any longer. We've also set up a plan to be able to cope with x20 load spikes (however unlikely the x20 scenario may seem) before the end of 2017.

While unfortunately no one can completely rule out the chance of another downtime some time in the future (there’s always a slight probability of some unexpected Black Swan event), I can assure you that we at Telegram are working hard at taking this chance to the lowest in the industry.

We strive to be the winner in every aspect including availability. So far the Telegram uptime stats look good compared to other major communication services – also because Telegram can never go down entirely around the world. But we are not satisfied with just that, and our work continues.

Thanks for your attention, and sorry again to anyone who was affected.

Today, Iran joined the list of countries I can't travel to – Tehran's prosecutor just filed criminal charges against me there. More than 40 million people use Telegram in Iran and we've never blocked a single political channel and gave up exactly zero bytes of data to the government (in Iran and elsewhere).

Russia, where we have about 10 million users, is also rushing to join Iran in filing charges against the Telegram management. They seem to be unhappy because we won't comply with the unconstitutional "Yarovaya laws" and won't give them the encryption keys they wanted. I always publish such demands online, and did the same today with the documents that the FSB has been sending to our London office in the past weeks.

Because of my parents, not being able to visit Russia on occasion is more painful for me than never going to Iran. But Mom and Dad are not too old to travel and the globe is still pretty big.

Our Asian users may have noticed two nasty disruptions in our service in the past week. The Singapore data center we’re using has been causing trouble due to a faulty UPS system. Power losses are something that is never supposed to happen in a data center, so at some point I even thought that this could have been an act of sabotage.

Most likely though, it was “just” a major hardware malfunction. The faulty UPS (Uninterruptible Power Sources) are being replaced by the data center staff as I’m typing this. I hope this will make things right as the absence of power supply is one of the few things we can’t fix by ourselves.

Asia is obviously a huge market for Telegram. However, as you may remember, Telegram is blocked in China – the continent’s largest market – since 2015, when the Chinese human rights activists started using Telegram to communicate.

We didn’t try to get unblocked there by negotiating with the Chinese authorities. It’s pretty obvious that the Chinese government's desire for total control over its population is incompatible with our values. However, Telegram is still available through VPN services, and recently more Chinese users started to join Telegram after their local app WeChat got compromised –

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-15/china-s-wechat-crackdown-drives-bitcoin-devotees-to-telegram

For us this is just another indication that sticking to your principles makes more sense than yielding to pressure. In the long run, compromise based on lies and violations of rights gets you nowhere.