INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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The Iranian government has blamed Telegram for helping organise anti-establishment
protests
Iran has started to disrupt the way that people can use the popular Telegram messaging app.In an official
statement, Iran's net regulator said swapping images and videos via the service was no longer permitted
It said the move was likely to affect the "quality" of the app in the country.Iran's move follows continuing attempts by Russia to restrict
use of the messaging system.Iran telecoms officials said Telegram's licence to site its servers in the country had been revoked and this
meant the servers had to be moved outside Iran's borders and all in-bound traffic must now be routed through Iran's government-controlled
net gateways.Telegram has yet to confirm that the blocks are in place or whether it has moved its technical infrastructure out of
Iran.Telegram is believed to have about 50 million users in Iran and the app is popular because the way it scrambles messages makes it much
harder for security services to scrutinise their contents
Iran's government has long been critical of Telegram and has said its use was behind a lot of anti-establishment protests in the
nation.Earlier this week Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, shut down his Telegram channel, saying that this would help
"safeguard the national interest"
BBC Monitoring reports that this move was widely seen as a precursor to an outright ban.Government workers and officials have also all been
told to stop using the messaging app.Instead, Iranians are being urged to use an alternative home-grown app called Soroush
In mid-April Russian net regulators blocked use of Telegram after the company refused to hand over encryption keys that would have let
security services read messages.The wide-ranging ban has also hit other services that Telegram was using to ensure the app stayed available
Cloud services from Google and Amazon were among those knocked out
