Apple briefly pulled Telegram from the App Store on Monday night after its review process turned up child sexual abuse material on the platform. The removal caught users off guard.
Searches for Telegram on iOS and iPadOS returned nothing, and its App Store listing showed a page-not-found error for roughly 40 minutes before the app reappeared.
Apple confirmed the reason in a statement.
“We briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after our review found content that violates our strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material. The app was subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it.”
Telegram’s side of the story, according to a company spokesperson, was that Apple had flagged a single user sharing the material, and that user was banned immediately.
Telegram also said it has removed more than 337,900 groups and channels tied to such content in 2026 alone, on top of 29,640 removals in 2025, much of it following tips from child safety organizations.
Existing Telegram users were not locked out during the outage. The app remained usable throughout, and it never left the Mac App Store. Only new downloads and the App Store listing were affected.
Telegram leaned into the drama with a characteristically dry post on X:
This is not the first time Apple and Telegram have clashed over content moderation. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store in February 2018 over what it described as inappropriate content. Telegram later introduced additional safeguards, andteleg the app was restored.
Telegram has also faced years of scrutiny over its content moderation practices. Founder Pavel Durov was indicted in France in 2024 on charges related to the spread of illegal material on the platform.
The company has also faced separate allegations from Russia and Australia over extremist and violent content.
