Telegram messenger hit by powerful ‘whopper’ cyberattack

Privacy-focused messaging platform Telegram has offered its users an explanation for a DDoS attack, with a curious analogy involving fast food and lemmings.

“Your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper.” the company wrote on Twitter, after admitting it had experienced “a powerful DDoS attack” on Wednesday affecting users in the Americas

“The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.” the company wrote, aiming to describe the workings of ‘Distributed Denial of Service,’ (DDoS) attacks - a go-to weapon in a cyberattacker’s arsenal.

On the bright side, Telegram continued, “All of these lemmings are just there to overload the servers with extra work - they can’t take away your BigMac and coke. Your data is safe.”

Telegram did not reveal more about the attack’s origin. However, according to Downdetector.com, a website where users can report faults with web platforms and sites, the issue seemed to have mostly affected users on the east coast of North America, as well as in Brazil and Argentina.

An hour after the attack began, Telegram declared that the situation had “stabilized.”

A map showing Wednesday's outage © Downdetector.com

Though Telegram’s users weren’t happy about the outage, some were at least amused by the response. “The award for best explanation of a DDoS attack goes to Telegram!,” one tweeted.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!