Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence on the app's brief removal from Apple's App Store, giving his account of what triggered the takedown and criticising Apple for acting without warning. Durov shared his explanation in a post on X shortly after Telegram was restored to the App Store.
What led to the removal?
Telegram disappeared from Apple's App Store in several countries, leaving many iPhone and iPad users unable to find the app through search. It was restored within hours, and Apple later said the removal followed the discovery of content that violated its rules against child sexual abuse material.
Durov offered a different framing of the episode. He said a user had planted illegal, AI-modified pornographic content in a public Telegram group by editing an old message in an active chat, which meant the content was "effectively hidden from the group's members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it."
He described the person behind the post as a "takedown extortionist," someone who he said demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities, and who uses automated accounts to plant illegal material before reporting it directly to Apple in an attempt to get legitimate communities removed.
Durov's case for Telegram's moderation
Durov argued that the episode did not point to a wider moderation failure on Telegram. He said the platform's systems are effective, and that attackers being forced to rely on backdated, near-invisible content to slip past detection was itself proof of that.
Apple's response, he said, was the real problem. Durov wrote that "Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us," and argued this exposed "a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content." He went further, suggesting that if an app used by more than a billion people could be pulled without prior warning, no app hosting user content was safe from the same fate.
A warning to other developers
Durov also flagged what he described as evolving tactics used by online extortion groups targeting communities across social platforms. He said Telegram had built up experience recognising these coordinated reporting schemes and protecting legitimate groups from them, even when doing so put Telegram's own App Store standing at risk, and cautioned that other platforms might not be as prepared to handle similar attacks.
