What a Few Hours Without Telegram Reminded Us

For a few hours on the morning of August 4, 2026, Telegram wasn't downloadable on iPhones. It vanished from Apple's App Store worldwide, then was restored within hours — Apple later said its review had flagged child sexual abuse material posted by a single user, which Telegram removed and banned before the app came back. If you don't run your business on a messaging app, it was a non-event. We're a company that helps people run their businesses on messaging apps — so for us, it was a gut check worth writing down.

The first thing we did was check our own numbers

Here's an honest admission. We build a multichannel CRM — the whole pitch is that your relationships shouldn't live on one channel. And the moment Telegram wobbled, the first thing we did was ask: how much of what we manage is on Telegram?

The answer was about one in seven — roughly 14% of the relationships our customers keep in Pantheon are concentrated on Telegram. Not catastrophic. But enough to feel it. Enough to be glad it was 14% and not 100%. That's the number that made this real instead of theoretical: even a team that preaches multichannel felt the pull of a single channel having a bad morning.

The app was never really the point

It's worth being precise about what actually broke, because it wasn't what the headlines implied. Telegram's network never went down. Accounts, chats, contacts — all fine. What broke for a few hours was the ability to install the app on a new iPhone.

But that's exactly what made it a good reminder. The thing at risk was never the app itself. It was the years of relationships and context people had built inside it — the conversations, the introductions, the half-finished deals that only make sense against everything said before. That's the asset. And for a few hours, it was sitting behind a door one company could open and close without explaining why.

What we're actually taking from it

Not "leave Telegram." We love Telegram — it's a great channel, and it's our flagship one. The lesson isn't about Telegram at all.

The lesson is that any channel you don't control — an app store, a messaging app, a social network — can change its rules or its availability overnight, and the only real protection is to not be trapped on any single one. Keep the channels that work. Just make sure the relationship itself lives somewhere you own, so if any one channel goes dark, it survives on the others.

That's the whole reason we built what we built. Today didn't change our minds — it just made the argument for us, out loud, for a few hours. If it made you glance at your own numbers the way it made us glance at ours, that was the right instinct.

If you want to make sure your Telegram relationships aren't riding on one app's good behavior, Pantheon is in alpha — join here and we'll help you keep them backed up and reachable. And if you just want the fuller argument, it's here: Platform risk: when one channel isn't in your control.