Hi XEOVO team,
I would like to ask about a possible new issue with Telegram MTProto / FakeTLS connections in Russia.
On 2026-04-01, multiple users on the NTC Party forum reported that MTProto proxies started failing around midday Moscow time. The symptoms described there are things like:
Telegram handshake timeoutobfuscated handshake is failedcannot process client handshake: cannot read frame: EOF- in some cases, temporary timeouts followed by a short recovery window
What makes this interesting is that people report it across different servers and different setups, while regular HTTPS to the fake domain may still work, and some users say that other protocols such as VLESS Reality on a neighboring port continue to work fine. There are also reports that the problem may depend on the ISP/path: for example, one user said it works over Yota but fails over Rostelecom home internet.
Some participants suspect that Russian DPI may now be selectively identifying Telegram MTProto/FakeTLS handshakes, possibly using TLS fingerprinting / ClientHello characteristics or connection behavior patterns. However, this is still only a hypothesis from the discussion, not a proven root cause.
My questions are:
- Have you seen similar MTProto / FakeTLS issues for users in Russia on your side?
- Do you think this is likely caused by newer DPI detection of Telegram handshakes?
- Is there anything that can realistically be changed server-side to mitigate it?
- Are you planning to investigate or improve MTProto-related obfuscation/fingerprinting resistance?
I would really appreciate any technical insight you can share.
Thank you 💝
4 Comments
It seems that connection failed if proxy uses 443 port.
More (possibly) helpful links from original thread:
Good read and resources. But like we said originally MTProto is not really suitable even with all FakeTLS on top of it, because Telegram team abandoned the protocol and haven't update it since 2018.
DPI vendors most likely have found the way to block it and now are slowly rolling out the updates. We are monitoring the situation and looking what additional tweaks can be done, however there is not much hope so far.
I would say it's now more up to Telegram team to help MTProto/MTG and related projects that help make it usable, but it seems like they don't care at all.
I agree that they really don't care about mtproto. They have enormous potential, but they don't do it.
Just as they won't build a mesh network of devices with Telegram installed. Because that would be a threat to the authorities not only in Russia but in other countries as well.