I’ve noticed that Telegram (both macOS and iOS clients) constantly tries to connect to 194.221.250.50 on ports 80, 443 and 5222.
What’s interesting:
- The IP is NOT in Telegram’s official DC CIDR list
- ICMP to the IP works
- TCP/443 is reachable
- TCP/80 and TCP/5222 silently timeout
- Blocking the IP does not seem to affect Telegram functionality at all
- Telegram keeps probing it at a very high frequency anyway
This makes me wonder whether this is some kind of connectivity / censorship / middlebox probing endpoint rather than an actual Telegram server.
Has anyone reverse engineered this behavior or seen discussion about this IP before?
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Updated in my comment
