Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers

strebz•about 1 hour ago

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.

AntronX•about 1 hour ago

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.

Anon1096•about 1 hour ago

Most of big tech's major data centers are in Loudoun County, VA on the east coast not the west coast. It's centrally located to be great latency for the east coast and OK latency for west coast and Europe. Plus a friendly regulatory environment and lots of existing DCs (AWS us-east-1, Azure East US 1/2)

If you're feeling any better latency on the west coast it's more likely to be placebo than real.

tobinfekkes•38 minutes ago

On the contrary, Big tech famously has plenty of data centers on the west coast:

• Quincy, WA (Microsoft)

• The Dalles, Oregon (Google)

• Prineville, Oregon (Facebook, Apple)

• Hillsboro, Oregon (Cloudflare, others)

• Boardman, Oregon (AWS)

Anon1096•9 minutes ago

By traffic load east coast datacenters dwarfs these.

hocuspocus•about 1 hour ago

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

londons_explore•about 2 hours ago

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?

codedokode•about 1 hour ago

It makes sense: European users are assigned to EU data center, and Chinese to the one closer to them. The "custom code" should not be complicated, just a map of country to DC.

You are suggesting to develop a compicated solution (spend money) when current simple one is working ok without any elections.

fullstop•about 2 hours ago

From what I have read, they only have ~30 employees. They're not exactly onboarding a lot of new people here.

inigyou•39 minutes ago

If you've ever actually tried to implement server clustering you quickly find there's no magic cloud, except in specific cases like blockchains. A privately operated cluster system is mostly about directing requests to the correct server out of a finite set of servers.

nurumaik•about 1 hour ago

Learn what? How to count to 5?

hashtag-til•about 2 hours ago

https://archive.is/VHlJH

dgroshev•about 1 hour ago

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-... )

overallduka•4 minutes ago

Good story, I yet believe the guy is trying to do the right thing. In the lex Friedman podcast he talks about banning extremist channels in both sides always, the story focus more on the Nalvani's block, but accordingly him he also bans other sides depending on the content. I do follow a number of Telegram channels about the Ukraine war, and the pro Ukraine channels are there together with pro Russian channels.

vvpan•19 minutes ago

It's a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.

DOGMATICA•about 2 hours ago

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!

Ghoelian•about 2 hours ago

idk, they probably tried to get people on DC's as close to their location as possible. Using your phone number's country code might seem like a good way to do this at first, and they probably didn't give it much more thought before building the whole thing on this idea.

hhh•about 2 hours ago

something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing

overallduka•37 minutes ago

The Lex Fridman podcast episode with Pavel Durov is worth listening to. Their servers are built to be very secure — of course, it would be different for others, and they use some clever tricks

Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers

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