Telegram's shortened domain, t.me, has been restored after being suspended for about a day. DomainME, the domain registrar, stated that the domain was previously suspended due to compliance requirements from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and has since been restored.
The domain name was temporarily suspended.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated on the X platform on Monday that the t.me link "has stopped working." Subsequently, DomainME, which manages the .me top-level domain, confirmed that the t.me domain had been placed in an "on hold" state.
Public network records show that the domain had previously been in a "serverhold" state. This typically means the registrar has locked the domain, causing the associated website or redirect service to go offline. This state was lifted earlier on Tuesday.
OFAC compliance became the direct reason
In its response, DomainME stated that the t.me domain was "suspended due to OFAC compliance" and has since been reinstated. OFAC is a division of the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for enforcing U.S. economic sanctions.
TechCrunch, citing Jonah Aragon, noted that the timing of t.me's suspension coincided with the U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions against a VPN service provider called First VPN on the same day. The U.S. stated that the service had been used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks.
The sanctions have impacted short links across the entire platform.
The sanctions list released by the Treasury Department on Monday included a full link to a First VPN public Telegram group, which used the t.me short link domain.
The report suggests that the registrar more likely suspended the entire t.me domain, rather than just restricting the single page address mentioned in the sanctions documents, to comply with the new sanctions requirements. This also caused a large number of Telegram's short links to become invalid.
U.S. companies that fail to comply with the sanctions could face hefty fines. The report also noted that another domain used by Telegram, telegram.me, was not included in the sanctions documents and remained accessible during the period in question.
