GEORGE TOWN: Messaging app Telegram is suffering from an outage in the Asia-Pacific region following a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on its servers.
Users were unable to send or receive messages since 4pm Malaysian time today.
At about 5.30pm, the messenger appeared to have been restored with messages started trickling in.
However, the situation returned to square one after it appeared to have lost its connectivity again.
As of 10.15pm, the service was still inaccessible.
Online service fault detector website downdetector.com first detected seven alerts on failed connectivity issues with Telegram.
Based on comments received on the website, most of the service faults were reported in the Asia-Pacific region.
"Telegram down. So I guess it's not as stable as WhatsApp lah aite." said twitter user @amin_aminullah.
The makers of the app later tweeted that it was faced with a DoS attack in India and the South-east Asia region.
"An ongoing DDoS is causing connection issues for our users in India and South East Asia. We're hard at work fighting back." @telegram tweeted.
According to the Digital Attack Map, a (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.
A growing number of Malaysians have switched over to Telegram as an alternative to popular messaging services such as WhatsApp and WeChat.
Stuff Magazine New Zealand has touted Telegram as the "best messenger app".
Telegram gained popularity after WhatsApp's infamous 'four-hour' service outage on Feb 22.
Following the crash, six million people downloaded Telegram the following day.