They are not down [1]. But it does look like a lot of Europe is affected [2] and if you stay on that page. It looks like the attack is growing. Top hits are "Ukraine, Germany, Russia".
Also, the OP link provides ZERO information on the claim. Mods could use my [2] link for the OP link. As it does seem to be happening.
There's a front page story every time google, apple or Amazon are down. I'm not sure telegram warrants the same publicity but it doesn't seem completely inappropriate.
I've honestly never understood why these sorts of posts (even for those larger companies with services everyone relies on) get so much traction on HN. I can very easily tell for myself when a site is down, and it's not hard to find most companies' service status page. Sure, if a few days later we get an interesting/detailed post-mortem from the company, I'd find that interesting, but "X is down" does not tickle me intellectually at all, and just wastes a slot on the front page. The inevitable speculation as to whether it was a bad deploy, a bad configuration update, a DDoS attack, whatever, is just not really interesting, though I guess (IMO unfortunately) enough people here find it interesting.
Of course, I'm here commenting, so somehow I got enticed to click through to the comments, so who knows what that says about me...
A bunch of people use telegram bots as a means of alerting themselves/other users (instead of emails and/or sms messages).
The production server might have a 150 load, with swap 99% full and 0 disk space left right now, and you wouldn't get any alerts from the monitoring software, because telegram is down, and it has "never happened before".
There's an encrypted mode but it's missing many features and in my experience most people use it rarely or never. The default mode is not e2e encrypted.
It uses standard transport encryption for all communication. End to End encryption is available for direct messages. It isn't used for groups, where real E2E is very difficult and complex and AFAIK nobody does it well, and channels, where it doesn't seem to have much point.
After ~30 minutes of "connecting..." I restarted Telegram (Linux app), won't log me in, says "Too many tries, please try again later". Hope they'll reset try counters when they are back online.
I appreciate Telegram's latest features and understand that stuff happens when you change things... hope they'll fix it soon.
Also, the OP link provides ZERO information on the claim. Mods could use my [2] link for the OP link. As it does seem to be happening.
[1] - https://twitter.com/telegram/with_replies
[2] - https://outage.report/telegram
Edited: for formatting and there does seem to be an attack growing. I also petition the mods to update the link to something more informative.