Pavel Durov

They had several teams competing for the title of the national Iranian messaging app.

All these apps failed.

People still preferred Telegram.

Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but WhatsApp wasn't banned.

Or at least they unbanned WhatsApp soon after.

At the same time, starting in mid-2017 or late-2017, Russia demanded that Telegram hands them the encryption keys.

They thought these things exist, something that would allow them to read messages of every person on Telegram, or at least every person on Telegram in Russia.

And we told them, it's impossible.

If you have to ban us, ban us.

And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018.

And that was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that.

And we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the sensor blocks our existing addresses.

And then it was completely automated.

We had millions of IP addresses.

We would be burning through them.

we set up this movement called digital resistance when system administrators and engineers all around the world, both inside and outside Russia, could set up their own proxy servers and their own IP addresses for Telegram to rely on in order to bypass censorship.

We ended up spending, I think, millions of dollars on that.

And as a result,

the censor got crazy there.

They would ban IP addresses and larger subnets of IP addresses and huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's infrastructure started to go down.