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...