Telegram stabilizes after cyber attack

Messaging service provider Telegram said on Wednesday it had stabilized its systems after a “powerful” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Telegram, which has more than 200 million users, had said earlier users in the United States and other countries may experience connection issues.

We’re currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues.

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019

“For the moment, things seem to have stabilized”, the company said in another tweet nearly an hour after it acknowledged here the attack.

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com here showed that users in the United States and Brazil were the most affected.

In DDoS attacks, hijacked or virus-infected computers are used to target websites.

A DDoS is a “Distributed Denial of Service attack”: your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper. (1/2)

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019

The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order. (2/2)

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) June 12, 2019