As I recall it, telegram was indeed banned, and was coming on and off line as it jumped servers among major cloud providers, resulting in major part of AWS and Azure IPs being banned as a collateral damage.

Then Telegram team came up with smart improvements to the protocol, like delivering individual IPv6 endpoint for each user via invisible push notifications.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246150/telegram-russia-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ipaddress...

> 'happened' (...) 'ban'

I'd like to understand the use of inverted commas here, as if things were not what they seemed. What gives?

the idea is that telegram is controlled opposition, with russia making a big show of banning it (ip blocking hugh suafs of aws) just in time for countermeasures to be completed

other background is that telegram was started by the same guy who founded vkontakt, russia's facebook, and that it advertises itself as having secure e2e chats, which are not default and are difficult to use