Telegram founder claims China hacked the app to disrupt Hong Kong protesters

The founder of a popular messaging app Pavel Durov says that Chinese authorities hacked the app to clamp down on Hong Kong protesters.

The protesters used the messenger to share the information, coordinate activities and alert each other on important developments. However, recently, the service went down due to a powerful DDoS attack that was traced back to the IP address in mainland China.

"IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram). This case was not an exception," Durov commented on Twitter.

Meanwhile, it seems that Hong Kong protesters are not the only one who fell victim to the DDoS attack. The company reported that users in both the Americas and some other regions were also experiencing issues.

"We're currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues," they wrote in the official Twitter account.

A DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack is a common tactic of cybercriminals aimed at making a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by sending billions of garbage requests. As a result, the server gets overloaded and stops processing legitimate requests.