By March 2018, that number had doubled, with Telegram reaching 200 million monthly active users. On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. The company says this is done “to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption”. It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests. As of March 2025,update Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users, with India as the country with the most users. The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia.

The editorial staff was made aware of the advertisement by a Telegram user and the online magazine Übermedien. This is seen as an issue for non-profit organizations and similar entities who want to operate a Telegram channel. As of August 2025, there was no option for channel owners to opt out of this mechanism. The revenue of these advertisements is shared with the channel owner in form of Telegram’s Toncoin crypto currency. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number in August but failed to do so, only declaring it had “significantly fewer than 45mn average monthly active recipients in the EU”. The criminal activity of 25 people was confirmed and copies of 30 databases were seized.

Telegram comes with one default sticker pack, and users can install additional sticker packs provided by third-party contributors. Telegram introduced affiliate programs in December 2024 that allow developers to create an affiliate program for their bot or mini app. In April 2022, bots gained support for customized interfaces and inline page loading. It features a website widget that can be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. These platforms also enable businesses to add Telegram chat widget to their websites and gives them the option to automate conversations or let human agents reply. In April 2021, the Payments 2.0 upgrade enabled bot payments within any chat, using third-party services such as Sberbank, Tranzoo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY to process the credit card information.

Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Brazil, and Pakistan. Regarding Telegram, the report cites its lack of end-to-end encryption by default, its Russian origins and third-party open source intelligence as major critical points. In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device.

Groups and channels

Similarly, groups and channels can have content protection enabled, which prevents screenshots, forwarding and downloading of media. Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app. Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender’s identity or to hide captions from media messages. Reactions are always on in private chats and can be enabled by admins in groups and channels with the ability to allow or exclude specific reactions. Users have the option to delete messages and whole chats for both themself and other participants.

Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments”. Telegram’s default chat function missed points because the communications were not encrypted with keys the provider did not have access to, users could not verify contacts’ identities, and past messages were not secure if the encryption keys were stolen. The order came following a complaint from media organizations —Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus+— saying the app allowed users to share copyrighted content without their consent.

In channels, users can start a livestream, that is able to integrate with third-party apps such as OBS Studio and XSplit. Telegram also provides an open API for the creation of custom bots which can perform various tasks, integrate other services into Telegram chats, or work as mini apps or games. Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from 1 day to 1 year.

In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users, later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024. On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users. On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached “about 500 million” monthly active users. On 24 April 2020, Telegram announced that it had reached 400 million monthly active users. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as of October 2019, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users worldwide.

shutdown of Russian political bots

Telegram’s optional secret chat function, which provides end-to-end encryption, received a score of 7 out of 7 points on the scorecard. The NDR stated that they had not noticed these ads before, but closed the channel, stating that an advertisement-based accumulation of Toncoin, albeit unsolicited and not withdrawn, was unacceptable for a German public media broadcaster. In August 2025, the German public media broadcaster NDR closed its tagesschau Telegram channel, which published summaries of news stories from the German television news service by the same name. In August 2024, an EU probe was launched into Telegram to determine whether the platform breached EU digital rules by failing to provide accurate user numbers. A few days later, following repeated criticism, the same judge suspended his order until the police issue a report on the consequences this measure would have for users. Scammers employ a variety of confidence tricks to entice users into completing “prepaid tasks” in which users deposit money into scammers’ accounts with the expectation of receiving high returns.

• The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that “a future patch would address the concern”.
• Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.
• Telegram has been used to distribute illegal pornography, including child pornography.
• On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached “about 500 million” monthly active users.
• In October 2024, Telegram added increased messaging limits for bots, allowing bots to send up to 1000 messages per second to their users.

Russian use for destabilization activities

To activate an inline bot, a user must type the bot’s username and a query in the message field. The Dutch website Tweakers reported that an invited bot can potentially read all group messages, when the bot controller changes the access settings silently at a later point in time. They can respond to messages or mentions directly or can be invited into groups, and are able to perform tasks, integrate with other programs and host mini apps.

Nicegram: Web3 для Telegram X

Telegram’s internal reporting system has an option to report content that contains child abuse, including specific messages in groups and channels. Following the launch of Stars, Telegram released several updates to their functionality, such as allowing Stars to be used to unlock media in channels or to buy gifts for other users. In late 2020, Durov announced that the company was working on its own ad platform, and would integrate non-targeted ads in public one-to-many channels, that already were selling and displaying ads in the form of regular messages. Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19.

Watch YouTube in Dark theme

According to press reports, prior to the bonds placement, Durov had rejected an investment offer for a 5–10% stake in the company as well as several undisclosed ones, valuing the company in a $30–40 billion range. A day later, the Mubadala Investment Company stated that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund participated in its deal undisclosed through the Russia-UAE joint investment platform to buy convertible bonds. The funding was required to cover the debts amounting to $625.7 million, including $433 million to investors who bought futures for Gram tokens in 2018 and included purchasers such as David Yakobashvili. The company was initially supported by founding CEO Pavel Durov’s personal funds after the sale of his stake in VK. In addition, Telegram offers functions for making payments directly within the platform, alongside an external service such as Stripe.

Що робити, якщо не приходить SMS або Telegram-код?

However, deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov denied any data from the app being leaked. In August 2024, journalist Ko Narin of the Hankyoreh exposed Telegram chats of teenagers who used generative AI to deepfake images of their classmates and teachers for porn. The President of North Macedonia Stevo Pendarovski, along with the Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev, demanded an immediate reaction from Telegram and threatened to completely restrict access to the app in the country if no actions were taken. Along with the shared photographs, anonymous accounts shared private information of the women, including phone numbers and social media profiles, encouraging members of the group to contact the women and ask for sexual favors. British far-right publication TR.news, following multiple deplatformings, launched a Telegram channel to spread its posts and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that Irish far-right groups grew substantially between 2019 and 2020.

Features

Telegram also offers an API that allows developers to create bots, which are accounts controlled by programs. Telegram stated that it does not have access to the data, while the platform will share the information only with the authorized recipient. When an online service requires such identification documents and verification, it forwards the information to the platform with the user’s permission. It asks users to upload their own official documents such as passport, identity card, driver license, etc.

• This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version.
• Telegram then gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates on 5 October 2021.
• On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended in Brazil and fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform.
• Third parties were asked to break the service’s cryptography and disclose the information contained within a secret chat between two computer-controlled users.

Any user can also send a message to a special “Saved Messages” chat as a form of bookmarking them. Sticker packs are made by Telegram designers as well as regular users and can be shared via links. Reactions can be used to respond to a message with emoji, with Premium users having access to more reaction choices and the ability to leave more reactions per message. As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a “cloud draft” that syncs with others, so typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example.

Вхід у додаток Telegram для комп’ютера

In March 2021, Telegram launched a bonds offering to cover the debt and fund further growth of the app. The company agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers. In January and February 2018, the company ran a private sale of futures contracts for Grams, raising around $1.7 billion. In June 2024, Telegram launched Telegram Stars to facilitate in-app purchases of digital goods and services, in compliance with policies from the App Store and Play Store. Durov said the bond sale “will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the ‘Goliaths’ of our industry”.

It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Diia application. Volodymyr Flents, the chairman of the public organization “Electronic Democracy”, announced on 11 May 2020 that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made. The company has a verified channel called “Stop Child Abuse”, where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. Twelve days later, Telegram told its users that the Brazilian Congressional Bill No. 2630 against online disinformation, which was about to be approved, would end freedom of speech in the country. Throughout 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used groups and channels to dox Iraqi and Iranian citizens, while sharing propagandistic posts on the platform.

Chats can be exported to preserve them via Telegram’s Desktop client, although the saved data cannot be imported back into the user’s account. Upon signing up, messages sent and received by the user are tied to their number and a custom username, not the device. To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform. Telegram then gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates on 5 October 2021. Telegram (also known as Telegram Messenger) is a https://chickenroadapp.in/ cloud-based, cross-platform social media and instant messaging (IM) service. Dark theme isn’t available for all apps.