VPN use is spiking in India after the country cut off access to Telegram to prevent cheating on a nationwide entrance exam for prospective medical students.
David Peterson, general manager at Proton VPN, tweeted that hourly registrations for the VPN spiked 150% last night after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India (MeitY) blocked Telegram for 150 million users “over leaked exam questions.”
Google searches for “telegram vpn” and “vpn for telegram” have also spiked over the last two days, according to Google Trends.
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Telegram has been suspended until exams are complete on June 22, “in response to the organized use of the platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates” taking the exam, India’s National Testing Agency (NTA) says.
According to the NTA, some Telegram channels have been selling access to what they say are copies of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate), known as the NEET-UG. However, the NTA insists that “there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain. The promise of any such material is, in every instance, a fraud.”
Scammers are reportedly using Telegram’s message-editing feature to upload exam content to old messages after the test concludes. That is then used as evidence that the exam questions were available before people sat for the test in a bid to secure more buyers. As such, the NTA requested that the editing option on Telegram be restricted until the end of the month.
The test was originally held in May, with 2.28 million people taking it, but the NTA scrapped it following allegations of cheating and rescheduled the NEET-UG for June, prompting protests.
On X, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said the ban “punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. And the ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps.”
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Students can also access Telegram by using a VPN. Telecom providers implement these blockades by region, but a VPN allows you to route your traffic through a location where the app or service in question is not banned. (ExpressVPN is PCMag’s top pick for location spoofers.)
In a statement, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) noted that students “depend on Telegram for study groups, doubt-clearing, and shared resources” and said the ban is an “overbroad restriction.”
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The IFF points out that the NTA touted that the risk had been reduced due to Telegram channel takedowns by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C). “If channel-level takedown contained the harm, the case for a blanket block collapses,” the IFF says. “The government has reached for a heavier tool while conceding that a lighter one was working. If the exam is secure and no leak exists, what is being suppressed is rumor, and rumor cannot justify closing a platform when specific blocking and criminal prosecution remain available.”
Telegram’s CEO made a more serious accusation about the blockade. “Indian telecom Reliance is sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking,” Durov tweeted. “This may be part of a competitive war, as Reliance is partially owned by Meta — the company behind WhatsApp.”
In 2020, Meta invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, owned by Reliance Industries. On X, Reliance Jio pushed back on Durov, insisting that it “has not been involved” in BGP route misconfiguration. “Jio continues to operate its network in accordance with global Internet routing best practices and the highest standards of reliability, security, and transparency.”
As Bleeping Computer reports, tech policy researcher Pranesh Prakash found evidence of BGP hijacking, but disagrees with Durov’s assessment about why it happened. Durov “thinks the BGP hijacking was intentional, and I think it highly unlikely to be intentional; it was incompetence. The bar for this being intentional is really high. So far I’ve seen zero evidence,” Prakash tweeted.
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Chloe Albanesius
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I started out covering tech policy in DC for The National Journal, where my beat included state-level tech news and all the congressional hearings and FCC meetings I could handle. I later covered Wall Street trading tech before switching gears to consumer tech. I now lead PCMag’s news coverage.
Getting my start in DC means I still have a soft spot for tech policy; Congressional hearings can sometimes be as entertaining as a Bravo reality show, for better or worse. But PCMag is all about the technology we use every day, as well as keeping an eye out for the trends that will shape the industry in the years ahead (or flop on arrival). I’ve covered the rise of social media, the iOS vs. Android wars, the cord-cutting revolution that’s now left us with hefty streaming bills, and the effort to stuff artificial intelligence into every product you could imagine. This job has taken me to CES in Vegas (one too many times), IFA in Berlin, and MWC in Barcelona. I also drove a Tesla 1,000 miles out west as part of our Best Mobile Networks project. Of late, my focus is on our hard-working team of reporters at PCMag, guiding and editing their robust coverage.
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