What Is BGP Hijacking? Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Accuses Reliance Of Using This Rogue Method For Blocking His App Outside India

· Free Press Journal

When most people think of censorship or sabotage online, they picture firewalls, blocked URLs, or government orders to app stores. But a far more powerful, and far less understood method of disrupting internet traffic has been thrust into the spotlight this week, after Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has now accused Indian telecom giant Reliance of using a technique called BGP hijacking to cut off access to Telegram for millions of users not just in India, but across the UAE and beyond.

What did Durov say Reliance did?

Visit sportbet.rodeo for more information.

In a post that has since gone viral across the tech and telecom world, Durov wrote, "Indian telecom Reliance is sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users outside India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking. The sabotage seems intentional, as Reliance has ignored multiple reports. This may be part of a competitive war, as Reliance is partially owned by Meta, the company behind WhatsApp. Network operators are advised to reject unauthorisedunauthorised BGP announcements from Reliance (AS18101) to prevent route hijacks and ensure stable Internet access for their users. Such abuse of global Internet routing is alarming. I wouldn't be surprised if Reliance/WhatsApp were also behind the recent lobbying effort to ban Telegram in India."

The accusation is explosive on multiple fronts. It names one of India's most powerful conglomerates. It invokes Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Telegram's most direct competitor globally. And it implies that a private company may have weaponised the backbone of the global internet for competitive gain.

In these screenshots that Durov shared, Reliance Communications is mentioned, and not Reliance Jio. RCom has been in insolvency since 2019. Its mobile business shut down years ago and it runs limited enterprise/subsea ops. He likely mixed it up with Reliance Jio (Mukesh Ambani's active Jio, part of Reliance Industries, with Meta's 10 percent stake in Jio Platforms).

What Is BGP and why does it matter?

To understand BGP hijacking, you first need to understand BGP itself, which stands for Border Gateway Protocol. Think of the internet not as a single network, but as tens of thousands of independent networks, called Autonomous Systems (AS) operated by telecoms, universities, cloud providers, and internet service providers around the world. Your traffic from Mumbai to a server in Frankfurt does not travel a pre-planned route. Instead, these networks constantly talk to each other, advertising which IP address ranges they can reach and via which path.

BGP is the language they use to have that conversation. Every network on earth trusts BGP announcements from its peers. When you type a web address, BGP is the system that figures out how to get your data there, hopping from network to network across continents in milliseconds.

The critical flaw? BGP was designed in 1989, in an era of academic trust. It has no built-in authentication. A network can announce that it owns IP address ranges it does not actually control, and other networks, by default, will believe it.

What is BGP hijacking?

BGP hijacking occurs when a network, maliciously or through misconfiguration, announces ownership of IP address blocks that belong to someone else. When this happens, internet traffic destined for the legitimate owner gets rerouted to the attacker instead.

The consequences range from inconvenient to catastrophic.

Traffic interception: Hijacked traffic can be read, copied, or manipulated before being passed on to the real destination, or simply dropped entirely, rendering services unreachable.

Service blackouts: If a company's IP addresses are hijacked, its users worldwide may find they simply cannot connect, even if the company's own servers are running perfectly.

Geographic reach: Because BGP operates at the global routing level, a hijack by a single network can ripple outward and affect users in entirely different countries, which is precisely what Durov alleges happened with Telegram users in the UAE.

Durov is specifically pointing to Autonomous System 18101 (AS18101), the unique identifier assigned to Reliance Communications' network. His allegations to the Jio network are likely misconstrued. The WhatsApp competitive angle doesn't map cleanly to the defunct entity. In any case, network operators should drop unauthorised announcements from AS18101 to stabilise routes. The observed impact outside India deserves technical follow-up either way.

His call for other network operators to reject unauthorised BGP announcements from that AS number is a direct, technical countermeasure, essentially asking the rest of the internet to stop trusting routing claims.

BGP hijacking is not new, but it has never been more dangerous than it is today. BGP hijacks can persist for minutes, hours, or even days before network engineers identify and fix them. Automated monitoring tools exist, but adoption is uneven, particularly in emerging markets.

High-profile BGP incidents in recent years have included accidental rerouting of Google traffic through China Telecom, a Pakistan Telecom error that briefly took YouTube offline globally in 2008, and a 2019 incident in which a small US ISP caused widespread European outages.

Read full story at source