Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers

The DC3 gap is interesting. I wonder whether they deprecated it because the other EU server had plenty of capacity, or still keep it but only for... "special" account data flow.

Also, it looks like it's easy enough to ID your DC on their API, though I haven't tried it yet (more of a Matrix Stan personally): https://core.telegram.org/method/help.getConfig

The article is from May 2022, just fyi.

DC2 is the first connection point of all MTProto clients.

Any DC may refuse a request and force the client to switch DC.

Profile URL doesn't show where messages/chats/channels are stored, as telegram has two dedicated DCs mostly for media. The rest DCs allow media with bandwidth being throttled.

They claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that's true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused.

[1] - https://telegram.org/privacy

DC in Miami, explains why Telegram app is snappy fast for me. I notice similar speed improvement with Meta and other big tech apps when I'm on the west coast. I guess latency matters when your app is making tons of requests.

This strikes me as a huge amount of custom code and technical debt. Every new software dev probably has to learn this.

Why not a sticky master election per user, and have no special data centers?

I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.

Beautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia.

[1] https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

https://archive.is/VHlJH

i'm far from an authority on content delivery or whatever, but the first thing I thought of was what a bizarre way to setup your infrastructure!

something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing

More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/

(and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )