The Telegram instant messaging application is under attack from all directions. After the arrest of the company's CEO and founder, Pavel Durov, in France on suspicion of complicity in drug trafficking, fraud and pedophilia through the platform he owns, now the European Union is also joining the investigation. The suspicion: Telegram provided false data on the number of its active users on the continent.
Telegram stated in February that it has 41 million users in the European Union. Under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number this month, but failed to do so, stating only that it has "far fewer than 45 million monthly active users on average in the EU."
Failure to provide the new data is a breach of the DSA, according to two EU officials. They added that the EU investigation is likely to find that the true number is higher than the threshold for "very large online platforms". Such a definition imposes greater obligations on the platform in terms of compliance and content management, external auditing and mandatory data sharing with the European Commission.
The European Commission's Joint Research Center — the European Union's Internal Data and Science Service — is currently conducting a technical investigation to determine the number of Telegram users in the EU, alongside ongoing talks with the app about its own calculations.
"We have a way through our systems and calculations to determine how accurate user data is," a European Commission spokesman told the Financial Times. "And if we think they haven't provided accurate user data, we can unilaterally define them [as a very large platform] based on our investigation."
As mentioned, Telegram's problems are not limited to the European front. Last week, CEO Pavel Durov was charged with aiding pedophilia, drug trafficking, money laundering for criminal organizations and distributing illegal content through the app he founded. He was also accused of refusing to cooperate with law enforcement in investigating crimes committed through Telegram.