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Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
- DOGMATICA 3mo agoi'm far from an authority on content delivery or whatever, but the first thing I thought of was what a bizarre way to setup your infrastructure!
- 486sx33 3mo ago[dead]
- Ghoelian 3mo agoidk, they probably tried to get people on DC's as close to their location as possible. Using your phone number's country code might seem like a good way to do this at first, and they probably didn't give it much more thought before building the whole thing on this idea.
- londons_explore 3mo agoThis strikes me as a huge amount of custom code and technical debt. Every new software dev probably has to learn this. Why not a sticky master election per user, and have no special data centers?
- fullstop 3mo agoFrom what I have read, they only have ~30 employees. They're not exactly onboarding a lot of new people here.
- codedokode 3mo agoIt makes sense: European users are assigned to EU data center, and Chinese to the one closer to them. The "custom code" should not be complicated, just a map of country to DC. You are suggesting to develop a compicated solution (spend money) when current simple one is working ok without any elections.
- nurumaik 3mo agoLearn what? How to count to 5?
- inigyou 3mo agoIf you've ever actually tried to implement server clustering you quickly find there's no magic cloud, except in specific cases like blockchains. A privately operated cluster system is mostly about directing requests to the correct server out of a finite set of servers.
- hhh 3mo agosomething smells suspicious about this kind of data routing
- overallduka 3mo agoThe Lex Fridman podcast episode with Pavel Durov is worth listening to. Their servers are built to be very secure — of course, it would be different for others, and they use some clever tricks
- dewey 3mo agoThat has "military grade encryption" vibes.
- Aachen 3mo agoVery secure but not investing in rolling out this mtproto they went through so much trouble to invent, nor making it usable by implementing device sync or all the other features normal chats have. Why does it smell like fish all of a sudden?
- vvpan 3mo agoExcept Pavel Durov has been caught lying before and in general is not a great source of information.
- maqp 3mo agoVery secure servers are openly documented (Kerckhoff's principle). Snake oil purporting itself as secure is always very hush hush and comes with claims of security. Besides, other messengers like Signal have already made the server open source, and they have native clients that end-to-end encrypt everything, so you don't even have to trust server. Durov requiring you to trust the server shows he has no idea how to build secure systems. He and his team are amateurs in security engineering.
- hashtag-til 3mo agohttps://archive.is/VHlJH https://archive.is/VHlJH
- strebz 3mo agoDC2 is the first connection point of all MTProto clients. Any DC may refuse a request and force the client to switch DC. Profile URL doesn't show where messages/chats/channels are stored, as telegram has two dedicated DCs mostly for media. The rest DCs allow media with bandwidth being throttled.
- AntronX 3mo agoDC in Miami, explains why Telegram app is snappy fast for me. I notice similar speed improvement with Meta and other big tech apps when I'm on the west coast. I guess latency matters when your app is making tons of requests.
- Anon1096 3mo agoMost of big tech's major data centers are in Loudoun County, VA on the east coast not the west coast. It's centrally located to be great latency for the east coast and OK latency for west coast and Europe. Plus a friendly regulatory environment and lots of existing DCs (AWS us-east-1, Azure East US 1/2) If you're feeling any better latency on the west coast it's more likely to be placebo than real.
- tobinfekkes 3mo agoOn the contrary, Big tech famously has plenty of data centers on the west coast: • Quincy, WA (Microsoft) • The Dalles, Oregon (Google) • Prineville, Oregon (Facebook, Apple) • Hillsboro, Oregon (Cloudflare, others) • Boardman, Oregon (AWS)
- Anon1096 3mo agoBy traffic load east coast datacenters dwarfs these.
- tobinfekkes 3mo agoThe parent comment wasn't regarding traffic loads; it was regarding latency.
- Anon1096 3mo agoYour experienced latency will be heavily influenced by which DC you hit, in which case we care about the relative traffic loads because you aren't just hitting your closest one all the time.
- hocuspocus 3mo agoI'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.
- dgroshev 3mo agoMore mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/ https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/ (and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-to-istories-investigation-on-messenger-servers/ https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )
- vvpan 3mo agoIt's a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.
- overallduka 3mo agoGood story, I yet believe the guy is trying to do the right thing. In the lex Friedman podcast he talks about banning extremist channels in both sides always, the story focus more on the Nalvani's block, but accordingly him he also bans other sides depending on the content. I do follow a number of Telegram channels about the Ukraine war, and the pro Ukraine channels are there together with pro Russian channels.
- dgroshev 3mo agoOf course he would say that. Even besides the fallaciousness of this argument (there is no equivalence between an aggressor and a victim), Pavel Durov is completely untrustworthy. There is product stuff, like misleading claims about Telegram's encryption and comparisons to Signal. In reality, for the vast majority of chats they have plaintext, unlike Signal. There are more subtle positioning claims. Durov made a huge deal of his "exile", but I saw Telegram's office in St Petersburg with my own two eyes a year after Durov "fled the country". It definitely wasn't shut. There were even local news of Pavel assaulting a guy in St Petersburg for trying to make a photo of him a couple years later. And then there are just completely unnecessary lifestyle claims. He said multiple times how he doesn't take any "pills" or medications. It only takes a minute to find his old photos. Male pattern baldness doesn't stop progressing without DHT suppression, and last time I checked, finasteride comes in pills. I don't understand why would he make misleading statements about something so visible, but it doesn't make him any more trustworthy.
- _ink_ 3mo agoThey claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that's true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused. [1] - https://telegram.org/privacy https://telegram.org/privacy
- amima 3mo agoThey do not claim that. They do claim that they store specifically encryption keys in several data centers in different jurisdictions. Here is the exact quote: "All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions". So only keys are distributed.
- hkpack 3mo agoWhat does heavily encrypted even mean? Fully encrypted? Slightly encrypted? Encrypted enough to call it “heavily encrypted” but not enough to be protected from whoever is interested?
- Perz1val 3mo agoHeavily means the key is large so it takes longer to crack, but also longer to encrypt/decrypt, so the service is more costly to run and slower. At least I've seen it used that way
- maqp 3mo agoThere's nothing slow about AES. In this context "heavily" means "we can't legally claim it's end-to-end encrypted because it's not". Also it's not even post quantum, so it's not heavy. Telegram's Diffie-Hellman breaks instantly with a quantum computer large enough to run Shor against it. Also, the keys sit on the servers' RAM, no matter what they lie. There is no global distributed RAM system, especially one that encrypts data in distributed fashion and works at the negligible latencies that Telegram boasts.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bflesch 3mo agoBeautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia. [1] https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
- dubbel 3mo agoThe article is from May 2022, just fyi.
- ameliaquining 3mo agoI think it was reposted today because https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless was just announced, which prompted some curiosity on HN about Telegram's architecture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918534). But yes, the title should be updated to indicate this.
- glaslong 3mo agoThe DC3 gap is interesting. I wonder whether they deprecated it because the other EU server had plenty of capacity, or still keep it but only for... "special" account data flow. Also, it looks like it's easy enough to ID your DC on their API, though I haven't tried it yet (more of a Matrix Stan personally): https://core.telegram.org/method/help.getConfig https://core.telegram.org/method/help.getConfig
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- SpaceL10n 3mo agoFor a hot second there I was really excited to learn about historical telegram "data centers". It's a capital T.
- sophacles 3mo agoYou may have already read it, but portions of this sprawling (and very very good) essay by Neal Stephenson get into the topic: Mother Earth Mother Board - https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- SpaceL10n 3mo agothank you, i have it in my reading list now.
- Terr_ 3mo agoAs a tangential niche-tourism shoutout: https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html Granted, most of it is a bit newer than the heyday of telegrams, but there's a little bit of overlap.
- SpaceL10n 3mo agothank you, i have it in my reading list now.
- flexagoon 3mo agoJust like DC5 is often down to the discontent of Chinese users, DC2 is the one serving all Russian and Ukrainian users, so in the more technical Russian-speaking communities "dc2 down" is also a pretty common saying
- bwunkhaus 3mo agoI've never listened about that but also im not a big telegram user... but that completely explains why mine is so slow.... I'm on latam and my account is on singapur..
- Peanuts99 3mo agoThe more I learn about telegram, the sketchier it seems.
- wronex 3mo agoAgreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?
- isatty 3mo ago- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on - Cat stickers - Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the messaging apps? It boggles the mind why other companies can’t get this done.
- josephg 3mo agoI’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?
- isatty 3mo agoSignal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.
- Krasnol 3mo agoWhat is slow? I don't understand what there is to accelerate.
- forgotmypw17 3mo agoThe main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process. Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.
- wronex 3mo agoAre people still using Telegram? What is the upside compared to Signal?
- crazybonkersai 3mo agoGood ux, pleasant to use. A large community and lots of channels with all kind of content. Api is also great for spinning a bot for whatever purpose. I have for example a critical error bot for a production server running. If a critical error occurs, I get an immediate telegram message.
- wronex 3mo agoSounds a lot like we might as well use Discord?
- arkaic 3mo agoDiscord is annoying af to use, slow and bloated like the rest of them. Really it all comes down to UX when anyone asks why use Telegram.
- gf000 3mo agoHow is that any better? Still no e2ee, proprietary, arguably worse UX for chat purposes.
- MaxMatti 3mo agoI have yet to find a messenger with a better UX than Telegram. And I have tried lots in countless attempts to get away from this badly encrypted russian App.
- stavros 3mo agoI really don't get the appeal. I mainly use Signal, though I also use Telegram a lot, and Telegram seems a lot more dodgy. I constantly get spam on Telegram even though I never get spam on Signal.
- ilikeitdark13 3mo agoSo data centers are kind of organised like street gangs.
- vvpan 3mo agoSomebody already posted it but I wanted to mention it again, investigations that Telegram has not been able to dispute have revealed that Telegram's infrastructure is managed by a person who is also managing infra for FSB. And this is happening unbeknownst to Telegram employees. https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/ https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/
- Grombobulous 3mo agoThis just makes me realize that three letter agencies of basically every country probably have an extremely easy time getting access to things by simply getting people hired as regular employees through mundane and routine means.
- ameliaquining 3mo agoOne hopes that the usual defenses against insider risk provide some help here.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoEssentially what I am saying is that most companies do a terrible job of that sort of thing and largely can’t fathom what an actual attack looks like.