Telegram founder Pavel Durov has leveled a major accusation against Indian telecom giant Reliance, claiming the company disrupted access to Telegram for users outside of India. Durov alleges that Reliance achieved this through a highly technical disruption known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking.
However, evaluating the gravity of this accusation requires looking past the corporate friction and understanding the core mechanics of how data moves across the global internet.
How the Internet Routes Data (And How It Breaks)
To understand BGP hijacking, it helps to think of the global internet as a massive network of interconnected highways.
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The GPS of the Internet: Independent networks (called Autonomous Systems) use BGP as a global routing protocol to announce which IP addresses they own. It tells the rest of the world, “If you want to send data to Telegram, this is the fastest highway to take.”
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The Hijack: BGP was originally built on trust. If a powerful telecom network accidentally or intentionally announces that it operates the best route to Telegram’s servers, global internet traffic gets misdirected. Instead of reaching Telegram, user data gets detoured into a digital dead-end or a malicious network—causing a massive service disruption even for users thousands of miles away.
The Need for Concrete Evidence
While BGP hijacking is a documented vulnerability that has caused major international outages in the past, pulling it off leaves a clear, public trail. Global network monitors constantly log routing changes. If Reliance did redirect global Telegram traffic, public routing data and internet telemetry should show the exact moment the false routes were broadcasted. Without this data, the allegation remains a heavy claim lacking essential technical proof.
Furthermore, the operational issues and regulatory scrutiny cited by Indian authorities are far from unique to Telegram. Platforms worldwide consistently grapple with compliance, content moderation, and local government friction—making a highly targeted technical attack an aggressive and unusual countermeasure that requires definitive receipts to substantiate.
