JAKARTA - The blocking of Telegram in India has actually made VPNs popular. When access to the messaging app was temporarily restricted due to alleged exam cheating, many users looked for other ways. Some moved to VPNs. Some more tried competing messaging apps.
TechCrunch, quoted Saturday, June 20, reported that Appfigures data showed the day of the announcement of Telegram's restrictions to be the biggest day for VPN downloads in India since at least the beginning of 2025.
Downloads of the main VPN app rose 49 percent, from an average of 139,000 daily downloads to 208,000.
Proton VPN and Turbo VPN recorded the biggest increase. In the Indian App Store, Proton VPN downloads increased by 113 percent. Turbo VPN increased by 85 percent. On Google Play, Proton VPN increased by 64 percent, while Turbo VPN increased by 35 percent.
The increase also occurred on NordVPN and ExpressVPN. NordVPN downloads on the App Store increased by 41 percent. ExpressVPN on Google Play increased by 31 percent.
A VPN is a service that helps users disguise the location of their internet connection and access restricted services. Therefore, this type of application is often hunted when there is a platform block.
The spike came after the Indian government restricted Telegram's access until June 22. The government is concerned that the platform is used by fraudsters to target participants in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test or undergraduate NEET. NEET is the largest college entrance exam in India based on the number of applicants.
The Indian government said the restrictions were necessary to prevent the spread of false test results and related fraud.
Telegram appealed the decision to the Delhi High Court. The company believes the government should crack down on certain content, not block the entire platform. However, the court on Friday upheld the restrictions.
The impact is not only visible from application downloads. Proton VPN said daily registrations from India rose 120 percent above normal conditions on Wednesday. On Tuesday night, after the Telegram restrictions were announced, the hourly registration jumped 150 percent.
Windscribe, a Canadian VPN provider, saw a similar pattern. Registration from India rose about twice as much as usual. The first download of the Windscribe iOS app in India also increased by about 89 percent.
"The spike in India follows the same pattern we've seen in regions that ban certain apps, impose age limits, verification obligations, or restrict internet access," said Rebecca Rosenberg, Windscribe's Growth Operations Manager.
Surfshark has also seen a 30 percent increase in demand from India since the restrictions were announced.
According to TechCrunch, Sensor Tower recorded a 10 percent increase in VPN app category downloads in India on June 17 compared to the previous day. The increase reversed the downward trend that occurred in the previous two weeks.
"The surge in VPN demand tends to follow any platform restrictions, whatever the reason," said Laura Tyrylyte, a privacy activist at NordVPN.
Tyrylyte assessed that the user response in India showed that people were quickly looking for tools to bypass internet restrictions.
Users are also trying other messaging apps. Appfigures noted that Signal downloads in India rose 72 percent on the App Store and 322 percent on Google Play after Telegram restrictions were imposed. Viber downloads on the App Store rose 216 percent.
The iMe app, which is connected to Telegram, jumped even sharper. Downloads on Google Play rose from an average of about 827 to 50,900 on June 16.
However, the blocking did not immediately make Telegram abandoned. Sensor Tower noted that Telegram's daily active users in India actually increased by 17 percent on the day the restrictions were announced. That was Telegram's largest daily increase in India since Meta's major service disruption in 2021.
Cloudflare Radar also saw a similar signal. Lai Yi Ohlsen from Cloudflare Radar said DNS requests for Telegram domains in India increased sharply in the two days after the restrictions were announced.
DNS is a system that translates site names into internet addresses. The increase in DNS traffic does not necessarily mean that users have successfully logged into Telegram. It could indicate that many people continue to try to open the application after it is blocked.
Telegram said it had been cooperating with Indian authorities during the hearing in the Delhi High Court. His lawyer said the company had deleted the channel marked by the government. Telegram also questioned the need for a full platform restriction that the company said affected more than 150 million users in India.
The Indian government defended the policy as a temporary measure related to the NEET retest. Attorney General Tushar Mehta said a permanent ban could raise issues of proportionality. However, he assessed that the current restrictions have a logical relationship with the government's goals.
In its ruling, the Delhi High Court said the authorities had followed the procedure because the order was an emergency.
According to Surfshark's Internet Shutdown Tracker, Telegram is currently blocked in 13 countries and has been disrupted in at least 40 other countries.
Sensor Tower recorded that VPN downloads in the United States had risen by more than 40 percent in a week when TikTok was removed from the app store in 2025. Windscribe also saw a similar pattern after internet restrictions in Iran and Russia.
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