The encrypted messaging service Telegram was overloaded by a distributed denial-of-service attack on Wednesday that its founder said had its roots in China.
A DDoS attack is carried out by taking control of devices infected with malware to overload targeted servers with huge numbers of requests, disrupting the servers' connection to the internet.
Telegram announced the attack on Twitter and said users in the Americas and "some users from other countries" would experience connection problems. It later added that the situation had "stabilized." Telegram has more than 200 million monthly active users.
Its founder, Pavel Durov, added that the attack was "state actor-sized" and had primarily come from IP addresses based in China. He said it coincided with the mass protests in Hong Kong.
—Pavel Durov (@durov) June 12, 2019
Those protests are in response to a proposed extradition bill that would allow Hong Kong citizens to be extradited to mainland China for trial. Critics of the bill say it would diminish Hong Kong's semiautonomous status and could cause citizens to be tried unfairly, as the mainland has weaker legal protections.
Bloomberg reported Thursday that Telegram was trending in the Hong Kong Apple App Store alongside the peer-to-peer messaging app Firechat. The administrator of a Telegram group with 30,000 members was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of "conspiracy to commit public nuisance," the South China Morning Post reported.
Bloomberg further reported that protesters had been wearing masks to avoid detection by facial recognition and avoiding public-transit cards traceable to their identities.
