Telegram Blames China For DDoS Attack Coinciding With Hong Kong Protests

The distributed denial of service attack that hit Telegram Wednesday came from China, the secure messaging app's founder said. Pavel Durov's tweet suggested that the country's government may have done it to disrupt protests in Hong Kong. From a report: In a DDoS attack, an online service gets bombarded with traffic from networks of bots, to the point where it's overwhelmed and legit users get frozen out. In an explanation Wednesday, Telegram compared it to an 'army of lemmings' jumping the line at a McDonald's and making innumerable 'garbage requests.' Durov said, 'IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on Telegram). This case was not an exception.' Tens of thousands took to Hong Kong's streets to oppose a government plan that'd allow extraditions to mainland China. People are worried that it would bring the semiautonomous former British colony under the Chinese government's thumb. These protesters relied on encrypted messaging services, which let them mask their identities from Chinese authorities, to communicate.

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