On September 8, Telegram's DC5 data center in Singapore experienced a failure, causing service disruptions for millions of users across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The outage began around 10:20 AM local time and lasted just over an hour, with services starting to recover by approximately 11:30 AM.
Singapore saw the highest number of issues, with nearly 4,000 reports. Other affected countries included Indonesia with roughly 1,284 reports, the Philippines with 933, India with 725, Malaysia with 544, Vietnam with 530, and Thailand with 253.
The nature of the problems varied: about 50% of reports concerned general app functionality, 40% involved messaging failures, and around 5% were related to login issues. Users were unable to send or receive messages, load conversations, or access the app.
The incident was not global, as Telegram's other four data centers continued to operate normally. DC5 serves as the primary hub for East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The facility has a history of instability, leading some user communities, including Chinese-language groups, to create informal tracking systems to monitor its status.
Past disruptions at DC5 have reportedly disproportionately affected accounts registered with certain regional phone prefixes, suggesting vulnerabilities in the routing architecture.
