It’s the morning this week, and your favorite app isn’t available to download in the app store? Before you start breathing hard through your mouth, just know you’re not alone.
One of the biggest messaging apps on earth was actually banned in India a couple of days ago, sparking one public argument between India’s IT ministry and Pavel Durov (Telegram’s opinionated founding CEO).
All this began with a case of academic cheating but then got heated, resulting in accusations of business sabotage, courtrooms, and even an influence on the price of cryptocurrencies.
But the key to understanding why it’s in this situation has roots in a recent Indian phenomenon: NEET-UG. Used to screen millions of candidates for medical colleges around the country, it’s a high-stakes, planet-altering examination.
And after a high of more than 2.27 million students sat for the exam in early May, the NTA, the body that governs it, had to cancel all its results just a week later after it discovered what looked to be remarkable correlations between a guess paper in wide circulation and the questions posed on the real examination. A leak, in other words.
And it compelled the NTA to announce that the exam would be re-administered on June 21.
It was during the run-up to this date that one started witnessing another sort of upheaval on Telegram; scammers were using the platform to set up channels where they peddled what they called "leaked papers."
With ominously named groups such as "PAPER LEAKED NEET," "Re-NEET 2026," and "Private Mafia," they exploited the stress of distraught students, touting success for anyone who could pay anywhere from a few thousand rupees to several lakhs.
And whether the scammers possessed the actual leaked papers or simply deceived hapless students hoping to cash in on the hysteria, the outcome was the same: further disruption, the erosion of public confidence, and significant pressure to clamp down immediately on fraudulent actors and prevent further tampering ahead of the re-examination.
Following a recommendation from NTA, MeitY has imposed Section 69A of the IT Act, a law that allows the Indian government to block digital content and platforms to curb fake news and in the public interest, effectively barring Telegram.
The company has been directed to remove the app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, effectively blocking access to its estimated 104 to 150 million Indian users—who constitute the platform’s largest user base globally.
The ban, however, has a short time limit, as it’s set to be revoked on June 22, a day after the examination.
In a distinct but similar move, Indian authorities also directed Telegram to prevent its Indian users from editing messages between today and June 30—and this specific direction has quite a unique story. Apparently, scammers were using Telegram's edit feature to upload seemingly ‘predictive’ old messages with claims of having 'leaked' question papers in advance in an attempt to dupe users into buying papers.
The National Testing Agency hailed the government’s action.
"This is a highly important and necessary step being taken by the Government of India in order to prevent any possible abuse and ensure the sanctity and safety of examination,” said an official at NTA.
That was not acceptable to Telegram CEO and Founder Pavel Durov. Within a few hours of the ban, on April 24, he took to Twitter on their platform and made another statement that the ban on his platform was overkill and that it was affecting users disproportionately.
According to him, not only did the ban penalize users who were not the cause of the problem, but the hackers continued to spread content to other platforms, hence not truly solving the problem.
“This ban will not stop the scams and will harm everyday users much more than it harms scammers.”
This itself was another development that would have been of significant consequence, but the Russian entrepreneur took it a notch higher by making a substantial claim regarding India's second-largest conglomerate, Reliance. "Reliance is allegedly using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking to cause global outages and block access to Telegram.
I know you’ve been blocked in India and some other countries, but these blockages have nothing to do with Reliance hijacking.
But since that time Reliance (or any other operator) could hijack IP addresses allocated to Telegram and do this anyplace in the world (including the U.A.E.).
To know how he reached such a conclusion, let us understand a basic working of BGP.
Imagine the Internet is a massive highway network crisscrossing cities (servers).
To have your mobile phone communicate with Telegram's servers, your data needs to traverse a variety of “roads” maintained by different internet providers.
The Internet Protocol BGP is the language of the roads, ensuring that the fastest, most dependable way for data traffic to reach its destination is used.
This process usually goes without a hitch because all networks honestly reveal which paths their networks govern. In certain circumstances, a network can erroneously announce, “Hey, actually I own the shortest and best way to get to this city.”
Trusting this announcement, other networks would begin routing traffic towards that particular network, which in turn could lose, delay, or even drop all such traffic without a clear reason.
Durov's complaint was that a network linked to Reliance, denoted by the AS number 18101, made precisely this sort of incorrect assertion—which has implications that extend far beyond the Indian subcontinent into countries that had no intention of banning Telegram.
He didn’t limit it to a technical issue; he even speculated on a reason behind this.
He pointed out that the only justification could be that Reliance is in a business relationship with the Meta Group, of which WhatsApp, the main competitor of Telegram in the messaging apps market, is a part.
He mused about whether Reliance and WhatsApp may have pressurized authorities to initiate the ban in the first place and that a temporary suspension of the competitor was, naturally, a benefit to the WhatsApp brand in India.
That’s a big accusation; that what was purportedly a measure against exam malpractice was, in fact, an instance of corporate competition.
“Reliance has not commented directly on record to it.
However, a senior official in the telecom sector described the claims made by Durov as ‘a mix-up,' and he added, 'Reliance Communications' and 'Reliance Industries' have been conflated; the former’s AS number is involved and not the latter’s network.
He called it a lack of understanding of the business or a lie.”
a senior telecom industry source told the Economic Times. None of the companies—Jio, Meta, Telegram, or Reliance Communications—have commented further in public regarding the issue.
As this battle played out on social media, Telegram had also engaged with the matter more officially.
The company had gone to the Delhi High Court to challenge the government's order blocking the service.
A judge has scheduled the matter for an urgent hearing, indicating that this is no longer just an internet argument but a real legal debate over India's ability to regulate messaging services during a crucial time for millions.
Now, there's a fun twist you may not expect: this event bled over into crypto.
Telegram operates its own mini-blockchain ecosystem, centered around a token called GRAM (tied to the TON blockchain) that's employed for features like "tap-to-earn" games, quizzes, and a few Web3 tools that live inside Telegram chats.
With an Indian user base larger than most countries, India accounted for the biggest share of that ecosystem.
Naturally, when the ban went into effect, GRAM plummeted in price, locking Indian users out of the crypto features overnight.
This is yet another example of how intertwined tech, finance, and social media have become—a ban designed to prevent cheating on a test had an impact on global crypto prices in the space of hours.
Currently, the ban is supposed to expire on June 22, the day after the re-exam for NEET is scheduled to be held.
But bigger questions hang: Will the government's order be set aside or altered by the Delhi High Court? Will Durov put some real proof in the ring of his BGP hijacking allegations, or will they just drift off as so much unsubstantiated rumor? And will the affair somehow affect how India deals with technology platforms during high-stakes national events in the future? What began as what looked like an obvious attack on cheating during the exam has, for now, morphed into something a lot more complicated, with much wider implications for a founder, a court fight, a tech spat with one of India’s biggest corporate groups, and even a slight fall in the cryptocurrency price.
It’s not hard to see how, in 2026, nothing quite touches a big app and an Indian government for very long before it becomes rather complicated.
That should hopefully cover the entire story clearly.
If you’d like, I can write up a more bite-sized, exciting social media-focused piece for you that’s tailored towards driving users back to this full article (for an X post, Instagram caption, etc.), or, if it would be helpful, a quick explainer for the concept of BGP hijacking, as that’s the most confusing element.
