The Iranian authorities’s try to dam the Telegram messaging utility within the nation has backfired, as customers discover methods to bypass nationwide firewalls and on-line controls, in line with Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov.
“Iran banned Telegram years in the past,” Durov mentioned on Friday; nevertheless, tens of hundreds of thousands of customers within the nation have managed to entry the appliance by way of digital personal networks (VPNs) and different related instruments, he added.
VPNs route internet visitors by means of servers distributed across the globe to masks the true Web Protocol (IP) addresses of customers and obscure their places. This enables people with VPN entry to bypass nationwide on-line restrictions. Durov mentioned:
“The federal government hoped for mass adoption of its surveillance messaging apps, however acquired mass adoption of VPNs as a substitute. Now, 50 million members of the digital resistance in Iran are joined by over 50 million extra in Russia.”
Decentralized applied sciences like blockchain, crypto and encrypted messaging functions can mitigate or neutralize state-imposed on-line restrictions and surveillance infrastructure, selling particular person liberty, proponents of decentralized expertise say.
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Customers flip to decentralized alternate options amid on-line blackouts
The federal government of Iran imposed a nationwide web blackout in January 2026, amid rising protests and civil unrest, which remains to be in impact as a result of ongoing battle between Israel, the USA and Iran.
Residents within the nation can nonetheless entry the web by means of Starlink, a satellite-based community, regardless of the federal government’s ban on it, or talk by way of BitChat, a messaging utility that makes use of Bluetooth radio waves to kind a mesh community between gadgets.
BitChat’s mesh community transforms every gadget right into a relay node that transfers knowledge to different gadgets operating the appliance inside vary, bypassing on-line and satellite-based techniques solely.
The federal government of Nepal imposed a social media ban in September 2025 amid rising protests, inflicting a spike in BitChat downloads.
Bitchat was downloaded over 48,000 occasions in Nepal the week of the social media ban, and the federal government of Nepal was toppled by protestors that very same month.
The appliance recorded an identical obtain spike in Madagascar amid protests, which additionally occurred across the identical time because the political revolution in Nepal.
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