Telegram has told Russian regulators that it is technically unable to hand the encryption keys to user accounts to the country’s secret services, just weeks after the messaging platform was ordered to do so or risk being banned in the country

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications watchdog, told the company last month that it had two weeks to give the FSB, successor to the KGB security agency, access to the company’s encrypted messages or face the possibility of being blocked. 

But in a letter to Roskomnadzor, Dmitry Dinze, Telegram’s lawyer, said it was not possible to hand over encrypted messages. Regular Telegram chats are held on cloud servers, with the data divided between the users and not held in any one place. The company also offers a “secret chat” function that changes the encryption keys every few minutes and does not store any of the data before the information is automatically deleted.