A most secure messaging app Telegram has been hit by a "powerful" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Wednesday morning.
The app was down for many users across the globe, but people in the United States were most badly affected by this attack, according to DownDetector.
The company said in a tweet, ‘We’re currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues.’
The app was down for just a little over an hour, and in the meantime, the company tweeted an explanation of how a DDoS attack works.
"Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald's in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper," Telegram tweeted. "The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can't even see you to try and take your order."
The firm described the whole mechanism of how hackers accomplish a DDoS attack.
"To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use 'botnets' made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa," the company said in another tweet.
However, Telegram said that every users’ data was safe, there was no kind of data hack through the whole attack.
"There's a bright side: All of these lemmings are there just to overload the servers with extra work – they can't take away your Big Mac and Coke," the company tweeted.
Telegram refused to respond to a request for comment.
