US targets one channel, registrar bans all of Telegram's t.me
Bureaucracy at its finest: OFAC tried to blacklist a single shady channel, and Domain.ME accidentally pulled the plug on the entire t.me domain instead.
On July 13, 2026, the US Treasury's OFAC added a specific network circumvention provider to its sanction list. The entry explicitly cited a single target link pointing to a specific Telegram channel.
Instead of restricting access to that single address, Montenegro-based registrar Domain.ME panicked and suspended the entire t.me domain altogether. Reading a full URL carefully was apparently deemed too time-consuming for the domain administrators.
During the sudden blackout, Telegram had to rapidly reroute its internal short-link traffic over to telegram.me across all mobile and desktop apps to maintain basic link sharing.
Following urgent outreach from Pavel Durov and public outcry, the registrar acknowledged the mistake and restored the short domain several hours later.
The entire farce highlights just how fragile global core domain infrastructure remains when a single overzealous domain registrar can accidentally knock out services for hundreds of millions over a typo in a paperwork checklist. Centralized web control keeps proving that the master key to big tech is held by surprisingly clumsy hands.
Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury
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