Yesterday you found a link in a channel, tapped "Connect Proxy", and everything worked. Today you open Telegram, it's stuck on "Connecting…" again, and you're back to searching for a working Telegram proxy for today. Probably not for the first time.
Let me say right away who's writing this. I own FreeGate, and we sell personal proxies, so I can't look at free lists as a complete outsider. What we sell comes at the very end, separately. Until then I'm relying on Telegram's own help pages and on a check we ran ourselves.
The search results for this kind of query already show what's going on. When we looked on 18 October, the top result was a snapshot of one channel generated on 8 July, with "20 min ago" labels on it that had been frozen since summer. A little further down was a collection dated 16 October in its title, while its text said "up to date as of 18 October", which happened to be exactly the day we opened it. Somewhere nearby sat a post the site's moderator had already hidden as spam. For a "for today" query, a July snapshot at the top looks rather cheerful.
What a link from a list actually contains
A proxy link looks like a long string, but it has only three parts: the server address, the port and the secret. Telegram won't connect without any one of them. The interesting part is the secret. The author of mtg, a program for running these servers, calls it the client's password, which has to be kept safe.
Now look at where that password ends up. We opened a large channel that the top search result copies from. It puts out a new post with one to three links every half hour, and on 18 October its posts older than a day had between 462 and 696 thousand views. So your password to that server has been handed to hundreds of thousands of people. Who runs the server itself, I don't know, and most likely neither do you.
The owner of such a server hasn't promised anyone anything, but they do have their own interest. Telegram lets you register a proxy with its bot, and then the owner gets usage statistics and can show a promoted channel to everyone who connects, to cover the cost of the server. Telegram's help page says plainly that many proxy owners make their connection details public, and right there it advises you to use only proxies from a source you trust.
One more detail is visible right in the link. If the secret starts with ee, the end of it holds the name of someone else's website that the connection is disguised as. In links from these lists we found well-known sites there, from big online shops to Google services. The proxy owner picks this name when creating the secret.
If you'd like to understand first how Telegram proxies work in general and how they differ, that's covered in a separate guide.
Why yesterday's link won't connect today
From the outside all the reasons look the same: in the proxy list Telegram says the proxy is not available, or keeps trying to connect forever. But underneath they're different.
The simplest case is when the owner switched the server off or changed the secret. The owner builds the link themselves from the address, port and secret, and can create a new secret whenever they like, after which the old link no longer fits. The server is free, so they aren't obliged to warn anyone.
Sometimes the server disappears along with its name. The address in a link is sometimes written as a name rather than numbers, and if that name no longer exists, Telegram simply has nowhere to knock.
One post from 16 March 2026 shows this well. Its author honestly split it into two parts: six addresses listed as working and nine under the heading "Sadly, these no longer work". We checked them on 18 October. All six "working" ones responded, none of the nine "dead" ones did, and for two of those the name no longer exists. But here's the more interesting bit. The six working addresses share the same key in the secret, and all six names lead to the same server. In the list they look like six backups, while in fact there's one server under six names, and if it goes down, all six go down at once.
And there's a reason that doesn't depend on the server owner at all. With some internet providers, the proxy address stops opening. According to media reports, in spring 2026 proxies in Russia stopped working en masse several times, and Telegram released updates.
What our check on 18 October showed
On 18 October we checked three sets of links: the fresh posts of that large channel from the last four days, the July snapshot from the top of the search results, and the March post. The method is simple: we connected to each server and asked Telegram for a reply through it. If Telegram replied, the server is alive. We ran the check from a network where Telegram opens directly, so it only shows whether the server itself is alive, not whether it will open with your provider.
Of 135 different links from the channel over four days, 129 responded. The age of a link made almost no difference: of the links last seen in the channel less than three hours earlier, 10 out of 10 were alive, and of those last seen two to four days earlier, 45 out of 45. We repeated the check 10-20 minutes later and got the same numbers, except for one link where the DNS failure was on our own machine.
The July snapshot is a completely different picture. Of its 47 links, 2 responded. For 28 servers there wasn't even a connection, for 9 the name no longer exists, and another 8 accept the connection, but Telegram doesn't reply through them. And only one of those 47 links still shows up in the channel's fresh posts.
So from our network, servers from fresh posts stay alive for days, while after three months almost nothing is left of the July list. I can't say from these numbers that links "die within hours", because that's not what we got. If your link dropped after an hour, my guess is that it's down to the load on a shared server or to your provider's network, but we didn't measure that from here, nor how link survival changes hour by hour. One thing is clear without any caveats, though: a "for today" date in a page title guarantees nothing.
How to stop hunting for a new link every day
Telegram's own features take care of most of this running around, and you don't need to install anything.
- Save two or three proxies from different sources and turn on "Auto-switch proxies". Then, if the current proxy fails, the app connects to the next one on the list by itself. In Telegram Desktop and on Android you can also set the timeout, that is, how many seconds to wait before switching.
- Update Telegram. In spring 2026, updates changed how the app works with proxies.
- Every now and then open the proxy list, look at the status and delete the ones that aren't available. Before checking, Telegram warns you that this will expose your IP address to the admin of the proxy server. That's true: the owner of someone else's proxy can record your IP and connection times, although they can't read your messages or identify your account.
- If Telegram on a computer says the link uses an invalid secret and you should ask the owner for a new one, or on Android that the proxy is not configured correctly and will be disabled, delete it right away. That link won't come back to life.
- Don't install any "proxy apps" and never give anyone your login code. A proxy connects through a link right inside Telegram, and the link contains only the server, port and secret, so it doesn't need the code. Telegram sends the code to the service chat called "Telegram", and you must never share it with anyone, including other services and apps.
Channels have also started posting a new kind of link, the WEB proxy. Telegram for Android itself describes it as a proof of concept, so I'd hold off on it for now.
If you need Telegram every day
Then it makes more sense to get your own link than to chase shared ones. And here, as promised, is the part about FreeGate. We make a personal MTProto proxy. The link is yours alone, each device gets its own, and nobody posts it in a channel. If it does leak, you change it in your account with one tap, and the old one stops working at once. New network or new phone, the link works right away, no waiting. It works only inside Telegram, so your banking app and all your other apps go online directly, as usual.
I won't promise that nothing will ever happen to a personal link. It isn't protected from your provider's network either. The difference is that hundreds of thousands of people don't see it, and you can change it yourself without waiting for a new post in a channel.
You can try it for free: 1 day after you sign up with your email and confirm your address, with no payment and no automatic charges. After that it's $1.00 for 30 days or $2.50 for 90 days, price per device, so a phone and a computer count separately. You can sign up and connect at freegate.app/world.