Messaging App Telegram attacked by DDOS; Service went down in Asia-Pacific

Encrypted messaging app Telegram was hit by a huge distributed denial of service attack over the weekend impaling its servers in Asia.

This giant tech company is founded by Pavel Durov, the co-founder and former CEO of VK.com, also known as "Russia's Facebook." Before getting hit by the DDOS (distributed denial of service), the company was briefly booted from the Google Play store due to some sticker-related issues with messaging app Line.

Users of Telegram in the Asia Pacific experienced slower connection speed during the DDOS attack. Some even got their connection cut out for several hours. Telegram explained that it had a surge in traffic, which hit a 200 Gbps mark. It is like having 200 billion random people squeezing into a bus per second.

The company delivers more than two billion messages a day and has 62 million active users all over the world. The company claimed that five percent of its global user base was affected and that 30 percent of that is from Asia.

A DDOS is an attack where the perpetrator overwhelms the servers of a particular company through flooding it with dummy traffic. This will render a site inaccessible to its users.

According to reports, the attack on Telegram could possibly mean they provoked China. Telegram is considered "anti-government" by official newspapers. The attack was done after the service was used by human rights lawyers who were recently arrested by the Chinese government.

Durov said in a statement that they don't want to point fingers, but claimed that the traffic was completely blocked in China. He said they are not "going to play cat and mouse with their government. Let them block."

There is no clear sign as to who was behind the attack. But there are allegations that China could have carried out the attack, considering its attitude towards internet censorship where they use aggressive offensive tactics against sites and services that are not in accordance to their stand.