India blocked Telegram during exams

On June 16, 2026, India began temporarily blocking access to Telegram over concerns about exam fraud. This ban was reportedly issued under Section 69A of India’s IT Act on the recommendation of the National Testing Agency (NTA) in an attempt to prevent cheating during the national medical entrance examination scheduled for Sunday, 21 June 2026. The block is expected to remain in place until June 22nd. Meanwhile, Telegram is challenging this decision at the Delhi High Court.

OONI data collected from India shows the blocking of Telegram on several networks. The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of telegram.org on 77 ASes in India over the last month (between 18th May 2026 to 18th June 2026).

Web Connectivity Test, telegram.org

India

OK

Confirmed

Anomaly

Failure

JSON DataCSV Data

As is evident from the chart above, most measurements collected from the OONI Probe testing of telegram.org over the past month were successful, only presenting a spike in anomalies from 16th June 2026 onwards – the timing of which correlates with the reported date of the block.

Notably, OONI data shows that the blocking of telegram.org is automatically confirmed (annotated in red in the above chart) on a few networks where IP addresses (such as 49.44.79.236, 172.16.16.250, and 202.83.21.14) known to be used for censorship are returned as part of DNS resolution. We are able to automatically detect and confirm such blocks because those IPs are included in OONI’s DNS blocking fingerprints database. These blocks are observed on Reliance Jio (AS55836), Atria Convergence Technologies (AS24309), and Asianet (AS17465).

On other networks, many measurements show that IP addresses resolved to by telegram.org are unavailable as TCP/IP connections to the resolved Telegram IP consistently fail, but succeed in control measurements.

Around this time, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov alleged that the Indian telecommunications provider Reliance interfered with Telegram through a BGP hijack. In practice, this would involve altering internet routing information so that traffic intended for Telegram was misdirected or dropped, making the service difficult or impossible to reach. Subsequent analysis of internet routing data by Kentik identified routing anomalies consistent with such an event. According to Kentik, Rcom (AS18101) appears to have intentionally hijacked Telegram routes, but the hijack accidentally spread beyond India, causing outages in multiple countries. The impact was limited because many international carriers used RPKI filtering to reject the invalid routes.

On a few networks, such as Tatanet (AS55333) and Vodafone Idea (AS55410), OONI data shows that the block appears to be implemented by means of TLS interference because even though TCP connections to the resolved Telegram IP are successful, the connection is reset or times out after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake.

Other OONI measurements from the testing of the Telegram app also show signs of blocking on several networks in India. The OONI Probe Telegram experiment is designed to measure the reachability of Telegram’s app and web version within a tested network. Specifically, the test attempts to establish a TCP connection to the endpoints of the Telegram app (DCs) and perform an HTTP POST request, as well as an HTTPS GET request to Telegram’s web version (web.telegram.org) over the vantage point of the user. The test results are automatically annotated as “OK” if the experiment succeeds in all of these steps. If they fail, the test results are automatically annotated as “anomalous”, indicating potential blocking.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of Telegram on 75 ASes in India over the last month (between 18th May 2026 to 18th June 2026).

Telegram Test

India

OK

Confirmed

Anomaly

Failure

JSON DataCSV Data

Similarly to the testing of telegram.org, we observe that the OONI Probe testing of the Telegram app previously showed that the app was reachable on tested networks in India, and only started presenting a spike in anomalies from 16th June 2026 onwards. As all measurements collected thereafter on multiple networks presented anomalies, they provide a strong signal of Telegram blocking.

Many of these measurements suggest that access to both Telegram Web (web.telegram.org) and the Telegram mobile app are blocked on many networks because they show that attempted TCP connections to Telegram endpoints failed and that the testing of the Telegram web version returned errors, such as NXDOMAIN errors or timeout errors. A per-AS breakdown of the measurement coverage shows that the largest volume of anomalies – and, therefore, the strongest signals of Telegram blocking – are observed on Reliance Jio (AS55836), Bharti Airtel (AS24560), Tata Teleservices (AS17762), and Vodafone Idea (AS55410).

If you are in India, you can help test Telegram and contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.