In the wee hours of the day, Telegram users started noticing something they never anticipated would happen. As per the users, WhatsApp - the most popular chat app had been blocking any links to the Telegram.me, which is a competitor to WhatsApp from the time WhatsApp suffered some outages. The users told that - the URLs still appeared as messages, but they did not register as hyperlinks and users were blocked from copying them to paste into another app treating them like malware or spam. The behavior was erratic as it wasn't exhibited on every device, but was consistent within devices, blocking both usernames and links to individual messages or chat rooms.
Even Telegram confirmed the activity, which instantly pushed a silent update earlier this morning with the same version number as previously deployed update, but a Telegram volunteer on the contrary, confirmed that a new 367 update was deployed this morning, which hasn't reached every device using WhatsApp, and that might explain why the block is not consistent across different devices. Testing revealed that the block also includes Telegram.com, an unrelated URL owned by a newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Its not sure whether the link is a purposeful move against Telegram or an unintentional glitch, but Telegram doesn't seem worried. "Typically, after a media backlash, FB steps back and blames their intelligent filtering for the problem," a Telegram spokesperson said. "We expect the same to happen this time as well."
Link blocking is a very common tool used by Facebook that owns WhatsApp. A few years back also, Facebook faced criticism for blocking Pirate Bay links and recently it again got criticized for blocking any mention of the social network Tsu.co which is responsible for paying users a percentage of its ad revenue for each post, these blocks are a regular occurrence within Facebook however with respect to WhatsApp this is the first major link-block we've seen so far.