Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)

The more I learn about telegram, the sketchier it seems.

Just 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

For a hot second there I was really excited to learn about historical telegram "data centers".

It's a capital T.

DC 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.

The 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

DC2 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.

Are people still using Telegram? What is the upside compared to Signal?

This 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?

They 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

Beautiful 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

I'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..

i'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!

I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.

More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/

(and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )

something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing

The article is from May 2022, just fyi.