U.S. Treasury sanctions on a VPN service knocked out Telegram’s short-link domain worldwide

Meduza reports that on July thirteenth, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a VPN service called First VPN Service for primarily serving cybercriminals and ransomware distributors. The provider's founder, Ukrainian national Dmytro Rashevsky, was individually designated as well. The public sanction list included a Telegram channel that promoted the service—t.me/FirstVPNService—and when it appeared, the .me domain registry, Identity Digital, apparently took that to mean they should block the entire t.me domain. That's Telegram's short-link service, used worldwide for sharing messages and channels. The global outage hit on July fourteenth. Security analysts believe it was collateral damage—the domain itself was never under sanctions, and blocking just that single channel would have required Telegram's direct cooperation, which the registry apparently never sought. By that afternoon, t.me was restored.

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