Telegram has been facing DDoS attacks recently and the services are being affected by the attacks. However, the founder of Telegram Pavel Durov believes that he knows the reason behind this DDoS attacks.
Pavel tweeted that the IP addresses behind this attack are mostly from China. This hints that the DDoS attacks are from China. Also, they are coming in at the same time as the protests in Hong Kong. He adds that same as previous cases, the attacks are not an exception.
Before this, Telegram’s official Twitter account revealed that they are “experiencing a powerful DDoS attack” and they further added that the attack was flooding on its server with “garbage requests” which is a way to halt the services that are happening normally and make the server crash under heavy load.
Telegram was also popular among the masses for the very reason that they are experiencing these DDoS attacks. On Telegram, you can create groups of up to 200,000 people as well as broadcast messages to as many people as you want. Because Telegram lets you send a broadcast to unlimited users which is why protests are the time when Telegram is used the most.
Also, it has strict laws regarding encryption and the service prevents even governments of the state from reading chats of its users. Now, Telegram is also used in the Hong Kong protests for spreading information as well as fake news, possibly. Just last Sunday, there were massive protests in Hong Kong against its proposed extradition bill.
This extradition bill proposed by the Hong Kong government is backed by China and it would allow a person arrested in Hong Kong to face trial elsewhere, including in mainland China. The Verge reports that “Critics fear the law could be used to cement Beijing’s authority over the semi-autonomous city-state, where citizens tend to have a higher level of civil liberties than in mainland China”