India temporarily blocked Telegram for a week starting June 16, citing concerns that fraudsters were using the platform to leak fake exam papers ahead of a retest for the country’s largest university entrance exam. The government said the move was needed to protect candidates sitting the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG). Telegram challenged the order in Delhi’s High Court, but the court upheld the restriction on Friday.
The response from users was immediate. According to TechCrunch, app intelligence firm Appfigures said the day India announced the block was the biggest single day for VPN app downloads in the country since at least the start of 2025. Downloads of major VPN apps jumped 49%, rising from a daily average of 139,000 to 208,000 in a single day.
The numbers across individual VPN providers were even sharper. Proton VPN saw a 113% jump in App Store downloads in India, while Turbo VPN rose 85% on the same platform. On Google Play, Proton VPN climbed 64% and Turbo VPN rose 35%. NordVPN’s App Store downloads increased 41%, and ExpressVPN’s Google Play downloads rose 31%.
Those download spikes also moved the charts. Proton VPN went from 18th to 5th in Apple’s Utilities rankings between June 16 and June 18. On Google Play, it climbed from 8th to 2nd in the Tools category. This kind of chart movement matters because it creates a feedback loop: higher rankings drive more visibility, which drives more downloads, especially during a news event when users are actively searching.
The impact went beyond download counts. Proton said daily registrations from India rose 120% above baseline on Wednesday, after hourly registrations had already spiked 150% on Tuesday evening when the restriction was first announced. The company called the increase “extremely noteworthy” given how large its existing user base in India already is. Canadian provider Windscribe reported sign-ups peaking around 100% above baseline, with first-time iOS downloads in India rising about 89%. Surfshark reported roughly a 30% increase in connections from India since the ban started.
“The spike in India follows the same general trend we see in areas that ban specific apps, introduce age bans or verification requirements, or otherwise restrict internet access,” said Rebecca Rosenberg, growth operations manager at Windscribe.
This pattern is well-established. Sensor Tower told TechCrunch that VPN downloads in the US rose more than 40% week-over-week when TikTok was briefly pulled from US app stores in 2025. Windscribe has seen similar spikes following restrictions in Iran and Russia. India’s Telegram block fits the same mold, but the speed and scale of the response suggests users are getting faster at finding workarounds.
“Spikes in demand for VPNs tend to follow any kind of platform restriction, regardless of the reason behind it,” said Laura Tyrylyte, a privacy advocate at NordVPN. “When access to a tool people rely on is suddenly removed, they look for alternatives fast.”
Tyrylyte added that the India response suggests users are becoming more familiar with circumvention tools and reacting more quickly than in the past. That is a meaningful shift. A few years ago, it took longer for VPN adoption to spike after a ban. Now, the reaction is almost instant.
Users also went looking for Telegram alternatives. Appfigures tracked some notable jumps in messaging app downloads following the restriction:
- Signal rose 72% on the App Store and 322% on Google Play
- Viber’s App Store downloads increased 216%
- iMe, a Telegram-linked messaging app, saw its Google Play downloads jump from a daily average of about 827 to 50,900 on June 16
What makes the India situation particularly interesting is that the ban did not immediately reduce Telegram usage. Sensor Tower said Telegram’s daily active users in India actually rose 17% on the day the restriction was announced. That was the app’s largest single-day increase in the country since a widespread Meta outage in 2021. Cloudflare also reported a sharp increase in DNS requests for Telegram domains in India in the two days after the block, though the company noted that higher DNS traffic does not necessarily mean users were successfully connecting. It could also reflect people repeatedly trying to reach the app after finding it blocked.
Telegram’s lawyers told the Delhi High Court this week that the company had removed channels flagged by authorities and questioned why a platform used by over 150 million people in India needed to be blocked entirely. Government lawyers argued the restriction was temporary and directly tied to the NEET retest, with Solicitor General Tushar Mehta telling the court it had a “logical nexus” to the goal being pursued. The court found that authorities had followed correct procedure given the emergency nature of the order.
The broader context here is significant. According to Surfshark’s Internet Shutdown Tracker, Telegram is currently blocked in 13 countries and has faced disruptions in at least 40 others over the years. India’s week-long block is part of a much longer global story about governments reaching for platform restrictions as a policy tool, and users reaching for VPNs in response. The gap between those two reactions appears to be closing.