Telegram app has been affected by an attack apparently related to the protests in Hong Kong

This is not the first time Telegram is affected by attacks from governments

Individuals in Hong Kong have been on the streets during the last days to protests over a controversial extradition bill in the city. Lawmakers were prepared to debate the bill that would have allowed China to extradite fugitives from Hong Kong. During these days, people have been using the messaging application Telegram that protects users’ privacy compared to other services.

Telegram Helps Protesters in Hong Kong

According to Yahoo.com, protesters in Hong Kong have been using Telegram in order to evade electronic surveillance. Due to this reason, Telegram has experienced a major cyber-attack that seems to have originated in China. The information was released by the CEO of the company on Thursday and he linked it to the protests in Hong Kong.

The demonstrations in the region descended into violence as police used tear gas and rubber bullets in order to disperse the protested that tried to enter the city’s parliament. This is the worst crisis that the city is currently living since 1997.

As reported by Yahoo, Telegram suffered a “powerful” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that involved a hacker that overwhelmed the target’s servers by making a massive number of junk requests. These attacks affected issues in different regions around the world.

The CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, commented:

“Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on Telegram).”

On Twitter, Telegram informed that the services were already established and they explained the nature of this attack that affected several users.

There are different individuals that are using Telegram to communicate in a more private way, including criminals and human rights activists. This is not the first time that Telegram is affected by a governmental attack. In the past, Iran and Russia decided to sanction the messaging application due to the effects that it had over the populations of these countries.

Telegram is going to be launching the Telegram Open Network (TON) and the Gram Coin on the Liquid exchange in October this year. The Gram Coin was previously sold to private investors and the company was able to gather $1.7 billion.