Critical Links Should Not Depend on One External Domain

Symptom

Links to bots, channels, and users through the t.me domain stopped working. The problem affected every place where the domain had been embedded in generated links.

Context

The external domain became temporarily unavailable. The registrar did not reliably confirm the reason or recovery time, but the product impact was clear: links that should have opened Telegram resources no longer worked.

Root cause

Critical user-facing links were generated directly with an external service domain. The application had no redirect layer of its own that could replace the target domain without changing every stored and generated link.

Broken assumption

We assumed that a global service’s domain was reliable enough not to disappear without warning. Even infrastructure that appears permanent can become temporarily unavailable when it is outside the application’s control.

Detection

The issue was found through broken links. Earlier detection requires periodic monitoring of several critical bot, channel, and user links, checking not only the HTTP response but also the expected redirect and target.

Fix

We quickly switched the links to an available alternative Telegram domain. This restored the links without changing the Telegram resources themselves.

Test

The regression check should:

• verify that the generator uses a controlled redirect URL instead of embedding an external domain directly;
• periodically open several critical links;
• verify that changing the target domain does not break existing links.

General lesson

Generate critical external links through an owned redirect or link service. The target domain should be changeable in one controlled place; otherwise an external registrar failure becomes a product-wide outage.