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Posted by theanonymousone 8 hours ago

Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)(dev.moe)
206 points | 101 commentspage 2
bflesch 6 hours ago|
Beautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia.

[1] https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

bwunkhaus 4 hours ago||
I've never listened about that but also im not a big telegram user... but that completely explains why mine is so slow.... I'm on latam and my account is on singapur..
DOGMATICA 8 hours ago||
i'm far from an authority on content delivery or whatever, but the first thing I thought of was what a bizarre way to setup your infrastructure!
Ghoelian 7 hours ago||
idk, they probably tried to get people on DC's as close to their location as possible. Using your phone number's country code might seem like a good way to do this at first, and they probably didn't give it much more thought before building the whole thing on this idea.
486sx33 8 hours ago||
[dead]
hocuspocus 7 hours ago||
I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.
hashtag-til 7 hours ago||
https://archive.is/VHlJH
dgroshev 7 hours ago||
More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/

(and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )

overallduka 6 hours ago||
Good story, I yet believe the guy is trying to do the right thing. In the lex Friedman podcast he talks about banning extremist channels in both sides always, the story focus more on the Nalvani's block, but accordingly him he also bans other sides depending on the content. I do follow a number of Telegram channels about the Ukraine war, and the pro Ukraine channels are there together with pro Russian channels.
dgroshev 5 hours ago||
Of course he would say that. Even besides the fallaciousness of this argument (there is no equivalence between an aggressor and a victim), Pavel Durov is completely untrustworthy.

There is product stuff, like misleading claims about Telegram's encryption and comparisons to Signal. In reality, for the vast majority of chats they have plaintext, unlike Signal.

There are more subtle positioning claims. Durov made a huge deal of his "exile", but I saw Telegram's office in St Petersburg with my own two eyes a year after Durov "fled the country". It definitely wasn't shut. There were even local news of Pavel assaulting a guy in St Petersburg for trying to make a photo of him a couple years later.

And then there are just completely unnecessary lifestyle claims. He said multiple times how he doesn't take any "pills" or medications. It only takes a minute to find his old photos. Male pattern baldness doesn't stop progressing without DHT suppression, and last time I checked, finasteride comes in pills. I don't understand why would he make misleading statements about something so visible, but it doesn't make him any more trustworthy.

vvpan 6 hours ago||
It's a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.
hhh 7 hours ago||
something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing
overallduka 6 hours ago|
The Lex Fridman podcast episode with Pavel Durov is worth listening to. Their servers are built to be very secure — of course, it would be different for others, and they use some clever tricks
Aachen 1 hour ago|||
Very secure but not investing in rolling out this mtproto they went through so much trouble to invent, nor making it usable by implementing device sync or all the other features normal chats have. Why does it smell like fish all of a sudden?
dewey 4 hours ago|||
That has "military grade encryption" vibes.
dubbel 6 hours ago|
The article is from May 2022, just fyi.
ameliaquining 6 hours ago|
I think it was reposted today because https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless was just announced, which prompted some curiosity on HN about Telegram's architecture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918534). But yes, the title should be updated to indicate this.