India’s week-long block of Telegram over exam fraud concerns triggered the country’s biggest single-day VPN download surge since at least 2025, as tens of millions of users scrambled for alternative messaging apps and circumvention tools.
The Delhi High Court upheld the temporary restriction on June 18, accepting the government’s argument that blocking the platform was proportionate given its link to organized cheating in the NEET undergraduate medical exam retest. Telegram, which counts over 150 million users in India, had argued that authorities should block specific content channels rather than the entire platform, and had already removed the channels identified by investigators.
Appfigures data shows total daily VPN downloads in India rose 49% to 208,000 on June 16, the day the block was announced. Proton VPN saw iOS downloads rise 113% and Google Play downloads climb 64%, with daily registrations from India increasing 120%, including hourly spikes of 150% on the evening of June 15 when news of the impending block first spread.
“Spikes in demand for VPNs tend to follow any kind of platform restriction, regardless of the reason behind it,” said NordVPN’s Laura Tyrylyte.
Windscribe reported sign-ups roughly 100% above baseline, while Surfshark measured a 30% increase in connectivity from India. The VPN category’s total daily downloads rose 10% day-over-day on June 17, reversing a two-week decline, according to Sensor Tower.
Rival messaging apps surge
Signal saw iOS downloads rise 72% and Google Play downloads surge 322%. Viber’s iOS downloads increased 216%. The most dramatic shift was for iMe, a Telegram-linked app, which saw Google Play downloads jump from an average of roughly 830 per day to over 50,900 on June 16 alone.
Paradoxically, Telegram’s own daily active users in India rose 17% on the announcement day, its largest single-day increase since the Meta outage of 2021, as users repeatedly attempted to connect. Cloudflare Radar detected a sharp spike in DNS requests for Telegram domains over the following two days, though higher DNS traffic may reflect repeated failed attempts rather than successful connections.
A growing pattern
The Telegram block follows a familiar pattern: Surfshark’s Internet Shutdown Tracker notes that Telegram is blocked in 13 countries and has faced disruptions in at least 40 others. Similar VPN surges followed TikTok’s brief removal from U.S. app stores in 2025, which produced a 40% week-over-week increase in VPN downloads.
Privacy advocates point to a silver lining: users are becoming faster and more sophisticated at deploying circumvention tools when governments impose platform-level blocks.
Sources: Telegram ban in India sparks a rush to VPNs, rival apps (TechCrunch, June 18, 2026); Appfigures; Proton VPN; Windscribe; Surfshark; NordVPN; Sensor Tower; Cloudflare Radar.