Whoops
Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov has just put out a statement about why Brazil’s Supreme Court is now suspending the app, and the reason is incredible. In the statement, which you can read in full below or on Durov’s Telegram channel, he says it was because his company was checking the wrong email address.
“It seems that we had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court,” Durov says, going on to explain that his company asked the court to send future takedown requests “to a dedicated email address.” But the court didn’t do that, apparently — it kept using “the old general-purpose email address,” and Telegram missed them somehow, and now it’s getting banned, unless the court takes pity.
The company says it’s now found those emails (implying that the old address did at least work, which makes it even more bizarre that the emails somehow got missed), and is trying to remedy the situation with the court. There’s a lot of political context surrounding the ban, which stems from accusations that Telegram facilitates the spread of disinformation, and my colleague Adi Robertson lays it out clearly in this story. But to hear Telegram tell it, the whole thing boils down to an issue we all struggle with — keeping track of emails.
