Earlier this week, Telegram sent out a message on its official Twitter account, informing its users that the messaging service was experiencing a powerful DDoS attack. Almost a day later, Pavel Durov, Telegram’s CEO, responded to his company’s tweet, saying that the attacks were coming from China.
According Durov, the majority IP addresses of the attacks seem to have originated from China. Durov also noted that the timing of the attacks seemed to coincide with the protests that took place in Hong Kong on Sunday.
For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last week, the citizens of Hong Kong recently took to the streets on Sunday to protest a controversial Chinese bill. The bill, if passed through, would allow the Chinese government to extradite individuals in the island city to the mainland. Giving the country more power to prosecute and silence people that the ruling Communist party considers as dissidents or a threat to national security.
Telegram is one of the most used messaging app in Hong Kong, primarily because of its encrypted peer-to-peer messaging algorithm. This isn’t the first time that the app has suffered a DDoS attack either; back in 2015, the service was brought down by a cyberattack, just as China was about to initiate a crackdown on human rights lawyers within the country.
