Telegram is once again at the centre of a controversy ever since the Indian authorities banned it ahead of the June 21 NEET-UG medical re-examination.
In the landscape of modern messenger apps, only a few platforms command the blend of user loyalty and regulatory anxiety that Telegram does. Hence, every time a government bans access to Telegram over an incident, the same question arises: Can a modern, cloud-native messaging app like Telegram truly be banned?
To get our answers, we decided to reach out to the very person who disclosed the critical security flaws in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal.
The illusion of ‘banning’ Telegram
When a government announces a ban on Telegram, the reality for the average user is often a mix of frustration and minor inconvenience.
“The Indian government has only enforced a DNS-level block on Telegram,” explains Nisarga Adhikary, the 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher and OSINT analyst. “They did take it off app stores, but considering the open-source nature of the app, APKs and IPAs are readily available on the internet, or anyone can just download the source code of the Telegram client and build the app themselves.”
Hence, on a technical level, a government is usually playing a “whack-a-mole” game. They order ISPs to stop resolving the domain names that Telegram uses and force Apple and Google to delist the app from the app stores. However, since the internet is a decentralised network of networks, these are merely speed bumps, not dead ends. Hence, in reality, you can continue to download and access Telegram even when a ban is implemented.
And thanks to VPN services, you can always bypass the restrictions and access the app.
The VPN story
For other messaging platforms, a government-imposed ban is usually a terminal event because they lack Telegram’s built-in, user-friendly proxy network. When those apps are blocked, users are forced to rely on external tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). While VPNs are highly effective at tunnelling around regional blocks, they add a layer of friction — monthly subscriptions, potential speed degradation, and the technical savvy required to set them up. All of that causes the majority of casual users to abandon the platform entirely.
Telegram succeeds precisely because it does not require a third-party VPN. Instead, it brings the “VPN-like” capability directly into the user’s hands.
The economic collateral damage
While some governments struggle to block Telegram, they seemingly get successful in regulating other platforms. Why? The answer lies in the collateral damage.
During Russia’s high-profile attempt to block the platform, Telegram moved its traffic across massive, shared cloud infrastructure. As Adhikary states, “Telegram rapidly moved traffic across major cloud providers. As Russia blocked Telegram IPs, Telegram shifted traffic elsewhere. To keep up, Russia started blocking larger and larger IP ranges. Millions of unrelated websites and applications used the same cloud providers and they ended up getting blocked while Telegram was still working.”
This is the “nuclear option” of censorship. If a government wants to ensure Telegram is 100% offline, they must be willing to block the very cloud infrastructure (like AWS or Google Cloud) that its own businesses and government services rely on. For most states, the economic cost of such a harsh policy is simply too high, and most of them would avoid such measures that cost them their core services.
The ‘Hydra’ effect
Telegram is also designed to be censorship-resistant from the ground up. Its built-in proxy feature, which allows users to route their traffic through third-party nodes, is perhaps its most potent weapon.
“If government blocks 100 proxies today, 500 new ones will appear tomorrow,” says Adhikary. “It’ll become a cat-and-mouse game.”
Because these proxies are easily shareable and natively supported, the barrier to entry for the average user is incredibly low. Unlike a complex VPN configuration, a Telegram user often just needs to click a link to regain access.
So why WhatsApp gets an exception?
A common question that arises on social media: If Telegram can be banned, why is WhatsApp—the world’s most popular messenger—rarely the target of such measures?
The answer is largely structural and political, not just technical. Meta’s WhatsApp is built for compliance. Its infrastructure is designed to integrate with standard local legal frameworks, and it frequently collaborates with law enforcement globally.
Furthermore, WhatsApp is deeply tethered to the Meta ecosystem, making it a “known quantity” for regulators. Unlike Telegram, which emphasises anonymity, i.e., allowing users to hide phone numbers and broadcast to 200,000-person “channels”, WhatsApp’s design promotes smaller groups and identity verification.
Is Telegram ‘unblockable’?
“Telegram is not ‘unbannable.’ No internet service is,” Adhikary clarifies.
“What Telegram has historically been very good at is making censorship disruptive and politically inconvenient,” he concludes.
Telegram is not a fortress that cannot be breached. Instead, it is a moving target designed to make the cost of censorship higher than the benefit. Hence, governments may eventually win a game of pure, total-network isolation, but doing so would require transforming their digital economy into a restricted, internal “intranet.” This is unlikely to happen in the age of internet-based AI.
As it stands, Telegram is likely to remain a concern for any regulator attempting to control the flow of information. It is not an unblockable technology but is simply a difficult one to suppress without breaking the rest of the internet in the process.