A domain used by messaging app Telegram mysteriously went offline on Monday, with the app’s founder Pavel Durov saying in an X post that t.me the links had “stopped working.”

The outage prevented users from accessing the t.me Short domain link, used by the messaging app to allow users to share links with a single click to join public groups.

The domain is now back online, according to Montenegro-based domain registrar DomainME, which manages the .me top level domain.

“He t.me The domain is back online. We will issue an official statement shortly,” Predrag Lešić, CEO of DomainME, said in an email to TechCrunch.

In a post on X responding to Durov, DomainME said that Telegram t.me The domain was “on hold due to OFAC compliance, but is now back online.” OFAC refers to the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes economic sanctions on foreign companies and individuals that pose an economic risk to the national security of the United States.

Telegram t.me The domain was taken offline after a serverhold lock was placed on the domain. A “serverhold” generally means that the domain registrar has locked the domain for some reason, which tends to take the domain offline. The “server hold” was lifted early Tuesday, according to the site’s public Internet records.

As technologist Jonah Aragon noted, the domain was suspended on the same day that the US Treasury imposed sanctions on a VPN provider called First VPN, which authorities say was used by cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks. US authorities shut down the site earlier this year.

The Treasury sanctions list for First VPN, published on Monday, contains a link to the full web address of the VPN provider’s public group on Telegram using the abbreviation t.me domain.

It is likely that the domain registrar has suspended the entire Telegram service. t.me domain to comply with the new sanctions, rather than restricting the specific web address that links to the Telegram group on the Treasury sanctions list.

US companies, including domain registrars, that fail to comply with US sanctions laws may face heavy fines.

Another domain used by Telegram, telegram.mewas not listed in the sanctions file and was operational at the time of writing.

A Telegram spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.