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.
Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
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Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#12I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#13More 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-... )
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#14They claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that's true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused.
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#15[deleted]
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#16DC 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.
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.
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#17This 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?
Learn what? How to count to 5?
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#18Beautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia.
[1] https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#19They claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that's true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused. [1] - https://telegram.org/privacy
They do not claim that. They do claim that they store specifically encryption keys in several data centers in different jurisdictions. Here is the exact quote: "All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions". So only keys are distributed.
Re: Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
#20This 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?
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.