Telegram founder Pavel Durov loves a good David versus Goliath narrative. He has spent years framing his platform as the lone warrior fighting against oppressive governments, greedy tech monopolies, and shady corporate interests. His latest target is an enormous one: Indian conglomerate Reliance.
Durov went public with a wild claim on social media. He accused Reliance of deliberately sabotaging Telegram access for millions of users outside of India, specifically pointing to the United Arab Emirates. He didn't stop there. He hinted that this network disruption was part of a coordinated corporate war involving Meta to clear the field for WhatsApp.
It sounds like a tech thriller plot. The problem is that when you look under the hood of how the global internet actually works, Durov's claims start coming apart at the seams. He is confusing corporate entities and mistaking basic technical infrastructure routing errors for malicious corporate warfare.
The Core Defect in Durov Allegations
Let's look at the actual text of Durov's accusation. He claimed Reliance is using a rogue method called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking to choke off Telegram traffic. He then asserted that because Meta owns a stake in Reliance, this must be a backroom deal to protect WhatsApp.
The first major flaw in this theory is basic corporate identity. The telecom industry knows something Durov apparently overlooked: he is pointing his finger at the wrong Reliance.
A senior telecom industry source quickly called out the claims as fake news, pointing out that Durov is confusing Reliance Communications (RCom) with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), specifically its digital telecom arm, Jio.
Meta bought a 9.99% minority stake in Jio Platforms back in 2020 to build partnerships around retail and WhatsApp commerce. But Jio does not run the subsea cable network infrastructure that Durov is complaining about. Those specific international transit routes and subsea cables are operated by Reliance Communications. RCom is an entirely separate entity that long ago split away and is not part of Mukesh Ambani's RIL or Jio. Meta has zero ownership stake in RCom.
The entire "Meta ordered a hit on Telegram using their Reliance puppet" theory collapses on basic corporate paperwork.
Understanding the BGP Hijacking Smoke and Mirrors
To understand why Durov's claim is so flimsy, you have to understand what BGP hijacking actually is. Think of BGP as the navigation system of the internet. It doesn't find the path from your house to the grocery store; it finds the path for data packets traveling across thousands of independent networks worldwide.
Networks use BGP to tell each other, "Hey, I have the fastest route to these specific IP addresses, send your data through me."
A BGP hijack happens when a network accidentally or intentionally broadcasts a false route, telling the world it owns IP addresses that actually belong to someone else. When that happens, traffic gets routed into a dead end or intercepted.
[User Traffic] ---> [Internet Routing (BGP)]
|
+---> Normal Route ---> [Telegram Servers] (Working)
|
+---> Misconfigured Route (AS18101) ---> [Dead End] (Disruption)
It happens all the time. It is usually the result of a tired network engineer fat-fingering a configuration file at 3:00 AM.
Major telecom companies handle millions of routing tables daily. Misconfigurations by massive transit providers routinely cause temporary, global outages for platforms like Google, Cloudflare, and AWS. When it happens to Telegram, Durov jumps straight to corporate espionage.
Durov claimed Reliance ignored multiple reports about the routing issue. Anyone who has ever tried to submit a routing error ticket to a massive global tier-1 telecom carrier knows that getting a fast response is nearly impossible. It requires navigating layers of automated enterprise bureaucracy, not a conspiracy to protect WhatsApp.
The Real Timeline Behind the Outburst
To see what is really driving Durov's frustration, you have to look at what else was happening the exact same week he made these claims.
The Indian government had just handed Telegram an unprecedented crisis. The Ministry of Education and the National Testing Agency (NTA) temporarily blocked Telegram across India. Tech giants Apple and Google were ordered to delist the app from their stores.
The emergency ban was enacted to disrupt massive cheating rings ahead of the NEET 2026 medical entrance re-examination scheduled for June 21. This exam is a massive deal in India, involving over two million students fighting for medical school slots. An earlier testing cycle in May was completely canceled after question papers leaked online, causing nationwide protests.
Indian authorities traced the organized fraud networks directly to Telegram. Channels with names like "PAPER LEAKED NEET" and "Private Mafia" were openly charging families lakhs of rupees for advance access to test papers.
Worse for Telegram, the government didn't just block the app; they ordered a forced product redesign. MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) ordered Telegram to completely disable its message-editing feature for all historical messages in India.
The NTA discovered that scam admins were abusing the edit feature to create fake proof of leaks. Admins would post generic text before the exam, wait for the real test questions to come out, edit the old post to insert the real questions, and then point to the timestamp to trick people into believing they had inside information.
Durov fought back on social media, complaining that the one-week ban "punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India" rather than stopping the insiders who leaked the material. He argued that the leaks would simply migrate to other apps.
He is not entirely wrong about that. App-wide bans are a blunt, clumsy instrument that hurt everyday communication and digital freedom. The Internet Freedom Foundation criticized the move as a disproportionate "band-aid solution" that doesn't fix the systemic roots of exam leaks.
But look at the timing. Durov was facing immense heat over child safety, cyber fraud, and exam leaks in his single largest global market by downloads. Deflecting the conversation away from Telegram's moderation failures and turning it into a heroic battle against corporate monopolists is classic crisis PR.
Running the Technical Reality Check
If Durov wants the tech community to take his global sabotage allegations seriously, he needs to provide the receipts. In networking, those receipts are called BGP route announcements and traceroute logs.
If a rogue BGP advertisement from autonomous system AS18101 (Reliance) was actively hijacking Telegram's IP prefixes, that data would be visible to every internet routing observatory on earth. Services like Kentik, Cisco's ThousandEyes, and the RIPE Network Coordination Centre track these anomalies in real-time.
When a nation-state or a rogue telecom company intentionally hijacks routes—like when traffic is diverted for state-level censorship—the routing data leaves a clear, permanent digital fingerprint.
So far, the global networking community has not produced any coordinated data showing a targeted, malicious hijack of Telegram traffic by Reliance. Durov's public advice to global network operators to manually filter out unauthorized BGP announcements from Reliance sounds authoritative, but it lacks the transparent data backing to prove it's anything more than a routine configuration conflict.
Unpacking this mess shows that Durov's corporate war narrative is built on quicksand. He got the companies wrong, ignored the mundane reality of standard BGP network errors, and used the drama to distract from a painful, government-mandated shutdown over exam cheating.
If you are trying to understand why your Telegram app is acting up, look at local regulatory blocks and routine carrier routing errors before assuming a global corporate alliance is out to get your chat logs.
Network engineers looking to verify routing paths during these regional disruptions should rely on public looking glass servers and BGP route views rather than CEO tweets. Track the specific autonomous system paths (ASN) to see where the packet drop actually occurs. For regular users dealing with the temporary blocks in India, relying on secure, alternative communication channels is the only practical path forward until the regulatory window closes.
