The boss of Telegram has claimed that a serious cyber attack on the popular messaging app came from China, raising suspicions about whether the hack was intended to stifle escalating protests in Hong Kong.

Pavel Durov, founder and chief executive of the encrypted messaging service, tweeted that a distributed denial of service attack, which overloaded the company’s servers with “garbage requests”, was tracked to “IP addresses coming mostly from China” and significantly slowed messaging on the app.

"Historically, all state actor-sized [attacks] we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong," he tweeted. "This case was not an exception."

Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets to protest plans made by Beijing to introduce legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China for the first time.

Attempts to push the new laws through by the regime have led hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to march through Hong Kong.

Protestors have been using Telegram to communicate given the security of the end-to-end encrypted messaging service, with the app proving to be one of the highest trending services on Apple’s app store in Hong Kong.