India Pulls Telegram Offline Until June 22 — and the Block Spilled Into the UAE
New Delhi cites leaked exam papers circulating in Telegram channels. Pavel Durov says Reliance Jio went further, hijacking BGP routes that broke the app well outside India's borders.
Key points
- India has ordered Telegram blocked until June 22 after leaked national exam papers spread through channels on the platform.
- Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has accused Reliance Jio of BGP hijacking, announcing routes for Telegram IP space the carrier does not own, then discarding the traffic.
- The disruption reached users in the UAE and transit networks peering with Jio.
- The block operates at the IP and SNI level, so an MTProto proxy restores access in seconds.
- UAE law restricts VPN use for accessing blocked services, which limits one common workaround.
What triggered the block?
India's Central Bureau of Investigation traced leaked answer papers for the NEET-UG medical entrance exam to paid Telegram groups, where material surfaced hours before candidates sat the test. Telegram's near-zero moderation of large private channels, combined with its refusal to share user data with Indian law enforcement, made it the obvious pressure point. The government issued a blocking directive requiring ISPs to drop traffic to Telegram's edge infrastructure through June 22.
Why did users in the UAE lose access?
Durov's accusation is the striking part. If routing telemetry from RIPE NCC or Cloudflare Radar supports his account, Jio would join a short list of carriers blamed for global outages, except those were accidents. This one, Durov argues, was not. BGP hijacking works by a carrier announcing ownership of IP address blocks it does not control, then silently discarding any traffic that arrives. Users in the UAE and on transit networks peering with Jio reported the app hanging on "Connecting..." or dropping media transfers mid-stream. Our earlier coverage from 17 June 2026 on BGP route manipulation noted how Indian telecoms infrastructure decisions can have consequences well beyond the subcontinent.
Should you worry about the routing data?
No regulator outside India has commented. Independent routing records will either confirm deliberate enforcement or reveal a misconfiguration, the distinction matters enormously for Jio's standing with international peers. If the hijack holds up under scrutiny, this stops being a domestic content-moderation story and becomes a question about how much damage a single carrier's routing decisions can cause to users who never consented to India's blocking order.
How do you get around it?
The block does not reach Telegram's protocol. MTProto traffic tunnelled through a third-party proxy still connects to Telegram's servers because the block works at the IP and SNI level rather than through protocol fingerprinting. MTProto proxies are small volunteer-run relays; Telegram itself lists working ones through @MTProxybot, reachable under Settings, then Data and Storage, then Proxy Settings. Most users in blocked regions restore service within seconds of configuring one.
A VPN terminating outside India or the UAE is the other option, with the caveat that UAE law restricts VPN use for accessing blocked services.
What should affected users do?
If you rely on Telegram for two-factor authentication codes or business communications, move those flows elsewhere now: SMS or a dedicated authenticator app will do. A channel block is not an account compromise, but conflating the two wastes time.
Anyone running a channel with Indian users should treat June 22 as a pause rather than a finish line and keep a mirror on Signal or a web archive ready.
The judgment here is simple: the exam-leak rationale is real, but a routing action that takes out users in another country is a significant escalation, and Jio has not yet offered a public account of what it did or why.
