Popular encrypted messaging service, Telegram, was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in Asia.

The company’s founder Pavel Durov said that a massive cyber-attack on his messaging service originated in China, raising questions about whether Beijing tried to disrupt a protest involving thousands of people who were protesting on the streets of Hong Kong.

The company said it experienced a powerful distributed denial of service attack after “garbage requests” flooded its servers and disrupted legitimate communications. “Most of those queries came from Chinese internet protocol addresses,” Durov tweeted. “This case was not an exception.”

Hong Kong is in the throes of political unrest as the Beijing-backed government attempts to force through controversial legislation that would for the first time allow extraditions to China, which protesters fear could be used to squelch government opposition.

The company went on to describe a distributed denial of service attack as when “your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper,” according to Telegram. “The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.” Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.

Commenting on the attack, Mark Skilton – Professor of Practice at Warwick Business School, who researches and consults on cybersecurity said: