When Indian authorities ordered Telegram offline last week, the intent was surgical — a domestic content block tied to a sprawling medical exam fraud scandal. What followed instead was a textbook demonstration of how internet routing failures don't respect national borders, and how the infrastructure underpinning global connectivity remains stubbornly vulnerable to misconfiguration, and potentially deliberate abuse.
A Domestic Ban With International Consequences
India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology activated Section 69A of the Information Technology Act on June 16, directing platforms to restrict Telegram access nationwide through June 22. The trigger: the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), India's most consequential medical school entrance exam, had been compromised. Question papers allegedly circulated through paid messaging networks, WhatsApp groups, and coaching-center pipelines ahead of the May 3 sitting. The exam was subsequently cancelled, a re-test scheduled, and federal investigators from the Central Bureau of Investigation moved in — making arrests that included NTA-appointed subject experts.
The National Testing Agency identified Telegram specifically as a distribution vehicle, accusing channel operators of exploiting the platform's message-editing function to backdate posts — manufacturing false evidence of a pre-existing leak. A secondary order required Telegram to disable editing features in India through June 30. Channel-by-channel takedowns had, by the agency's own account, failed to contain the fraud. A platform-wide block was declared a last resort.
Whatever one thinks of the policy logic, the technical execution is where things unraveled.
BGP Hijacking: When a Local Block Goes Global
Border Gateway Protocol — BGP — is the routing language of the internet. It's the system through which networks advertise which IP address ranges they own, allowing traffic to find its way across thousands of interconnected autonomous systems worldwide. It was designed for trust, not verification, and that architectural weakness has been exploited for decades.
A BGP hijack occurs when a network announces ownership of IP ranges it doesn't legitimately control. Depending on how widely that announcement propagates, it can redirect traffic, drop connections entirely, or expose communications to interception — sometimes affecting users thousands of miles from the intended target.
That's precisely what happened here. Public routing data and independent analysis from network researchers confirmed that AS18101 — an autonomous system registered to Reliance Communications, the now-insolvent remnant of the Anil Ambani telecom empire — began announcing Telegram's IP prefixes around the time India's domestic block went live. The announcement shouldn't have traveled far. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), a route-origin validation mechanism designed to curb exactly this kind of leak, should have caused most networks to reject the invalid route.
But it didn't stay contained. The hijacked route propagated to the global internet via FLAG Telecom (AS15412), a transit provider with historical ties to the old RCom infrastructure, which failed to filter the RPKI-invalid announcement. Users in the UAE — and potentially elsewhere — lost access to Telegram as a result.
"The routing anomaly is documented. The intent, and the identity of whoever triggered it, are not yet established."
Deliberate Sabotage or Catastrophic Misconfiguration?
Telegram's CEO publicly accused Reliance of deliberate interference, framing the cross-border disruption as possible competitive sabotage given Reliance Jio's relationship with Meta — a Telegram rival. He urged network operators globally to reject unauthorized BGP announcements from the implicated autonomous system.
Independent analysts pushed back on the sabotage framing, firmly. Network researchers who examined the routing data characterized the incident as a domestic block misconfigured into a global leak — technically damaging, but consistent with accident rather than malice. The comparison drawn was to Iraq's 2023 Telegram block, where an attempt to cut domestic access inadvertently bled outward through similar routing failures.
The corporate-rivalry angle is further complicated by a critical distinction: AS18101 belongs to Reliance Communications — Anil Ambani's defunct carrier — not Reliance Jio, the Mukesh Ambani-led operator in which Meta holds a minority stake. These are legally and operationally distinct entities, despite some asset overlap from bankruptcy proceedings. The question of who actually originated the hijack announcement remains open.
What isn't in question is that RPKI adoption, while improving, remains incomplete enough that a single transit provider's filtering failure can propagate a bad route across continents.
The Policy Problem: Proportionality and Procedural Overreach
Digital rights organizations were quick to challenge the ban on legal and constitutional grounds. The Internet Freedom Foundation characterized the block as exceeding the statutory scope of Section 69A and the associated blocking rules — arguing it fails the proportionality test that Indian courts have established for content restrictions. Blocking a platform used by hundreds of millions of Indians to address fraud perpetrated by a comparatively small number of actors, the argument goes, is a legislative sledgehammer where a scalpel was required.
Telegram itself made a pointed analogy: shutting down every shopping mall because one contained a shoplifter, or closing all roads because someone might speed. The platform maintains it proactively removed hundreds of channels distributing leaked materials and scam content in India in the weeks preceding the ban. Telegram has since filed an urgent challenge before the Delhi High Court, which agreed to hear the matter.
What You Should Do
The Bigger Picture
India's Telegram block will likely expire on schedule, the routing anomaly has already been largely corrected, and the legal challenge will play out over weeks or months. But the episode leaves behind something instructive: the global internet's routing layer is governed by trust, imperfectly validated, and prone to failures that ignore the political boundaries regulators assume they're enforcing. Every nation that reaches for a platform ban is, knowingly or not, reaching into infrastructure it doesn't fully control — with consequences that can land in someone else's country entirely.
