Montenegro registrar restores Telegram domain after US sanctions hold

Telegram’s t.me shortlink domain was restored early on Tuesday after a day-long suspension that prevented users from accessing one-click links to public groups. Pavel Durov, the messaging app’s founder, publicly flagged the outage on Monday, noting simply that t.me links had "stopped working."

The disruption originated with DomainME, the Montenegro-based domain registrar that manages the .me top-level domain registry. The company placed a "serverhold" block on the domain, a technical status that effectively locks a domain and knocks it offline. “The t.me domain is back online. We will be issuing an official statement shortly,” said Predrag Lešić, the chief executive of DomainME.

DomainME explicitly cited American regulatory pressure as the cause. In a post on X responding to Durov, the company stated the domain was put "on hold due to the OFAC compliance, but it is back online now." OFAC refers to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency responsible for imposing economic sanctions on overseas individuals and companies that pose a national security risk.

The timing points to a specific trigger. Technologist Jonah Aragon noted that the domain dropped offline on the exact same day the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a VPN provider called First VPN. U.S. authorities had already shut down First VPN earlier this year, stating it was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. The Treasury’s Monday sanctions listing included a direct t.me link to the VPN provider’s public Telegram group.

Rather than restricting the specific web address mentioned in the Treasury filing, DomainME appears to have suspended the entirety of Telegram’s t.me domain. This broad compliance tactic underscores the difficult position of European infrastructure companies caught between U.S. law and global tech platforms. Domain registrars that fail to adhere to U.S. sanctions laws face heavy financial penalties, creating a strong incentive to over-block.

For European businesses, the brief blackout is a reminder of the fragility of digital infrastructure reliant on American-dominated regulatory frameworks. A sanctions action targeting a VPN provider accused of cybercrime inadvertently severed a core routing tool for a major messaging platform. A spokesperson for Telegram did not respond to a request for comment. A secondary domain used by the company, telegram.me, was unaffected and remained operational.