You click the Telegram shortcut, and nothing happens. Or the window flashes and disappears. Or it opens, your chats are there, but no new messages come in, and something keeps spinning in the bottom left corner. Meanwhile your phone is lying right next to you, and Telegram works on it just fine.
You go and search, and the advice comes from every direction: run it as administrator, turn off your antivirus, delete some folder called tdata, reinstall, because "it's all in the cloud anyway". And now you're worried that the folder will take your login and your settings with it. Let me say right away that you shouldn't touch tdata yet, and you shouldn't reinstall Telegram as your very first step either.
There's no window, but Telegram may already be running
Telegram Desktop, the program for Windows, Mac and Linux, keeps not just a window by default but also an icon in the tray, next to the clock. When you click the cross, the program hides the window in the tray and keeps running. A cross that doesn't close anything is a genre of its own, of course, but that's how it's meant to work. On a Mac, a closed window also leaves Telegram running in the background.
I checked one more detail against the Telegram Desktop code. Launching it a second time doesn't open a second copy: the new copy finds the one that's already running, asks it to show its window and quits. While the first copy is responding, the window simply appears and you never notice it happened that way. But if it has frozen, you can click the shortcut as many times as you like, and nothing will open until you close it.
I'd go from top to bottom and stop where the window shows up:
- Find the Telegram icon in the tray and click it. Maybe the window is just hidden. Some Linux desktops have no tray at all, so skip this step there.
- If the window still doesn't appear, open the icon's menu and quit Telegram completely (there's a separate item for that, "Quit Telegram"). Then start the program again from the shortcut.
- If Telegram doesn't react even to the icon, force it to close. In Windows, Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens Task Manager: find Telegram there and end the process. On a Mac, press Option+Command+Esc, pick Telegram and choose force quit, as Apple's support page describes it.
- Start Telegram again and give it a little time. Sometimes the program installs an already downloaded update first, instead of opening a window.
- If there's still no window, update the whole program by downloading a fresh installer. The Telegram Desktop version log regularly lists launch fixes: some for certain Windows 7 machines, some for older macOS versions, some for Linux.
Take the program only from official places: the site desktop.telegram.org, the Telegram Desktop releases on GitHub, the Microsoft Store, the Mac App Store, Snap or Flatpak. If the official site doesn't open for you, I'd take the installer from the releases on GitHub or from your app store, but not from a file-sharing site. The latest version also has a lower limit on the system: it needs Windows 7 or newer and macOS 10.13 or newer, so on a really old computer it won't start.
As for running it as administrator and turning off your antivirus from the start of this article, I found no confirmation that either one fixes Telegram Desktop, and that's why I'm not recommending them.
The window opened, but the chats are stuck
On a phone, Telegram reports a problem at the top of the screen, but on a computer there is no such message. Telegram Desktop shows the state of the connection with a small indicator in the bottom left corner, under the chat list, and while there's no connection, that indicator spins. If you hover the mouse over it, a message appears saying that it's connecting ("Connecting..."). And if connecting failed and the program is waiting for its next attempt, it says in how many seconds it will try again ("Reconnect in … s...") and there's a button to try right now ("Try now"). At the top of an open chat you can also see that it's connecting. A "waiting for network" message like the one on a phone doesn't exist in Telegram Desktop at all.
The most useful thing here is that clicking the indicator opens the proxy list. And this is where the answer turns up more often than you'd think: at some point you connected a proxy, it stopped responding, and Telegram keeps stubbornly knocking through it. A shared link from some list could easily have just died. By the way, while a proxy is turned on, the indicator is visible all the time, even when the connection is fine, it just doesn't spin then.
You can turn the proxy off in Telegram's own settings. In "Settings" → "Advanced" there's a "Connection type" item, and you want the "Disable proxy" option. How to bring a proxy back and what the statuses in the list mean, I covered in detail in the article about the proxy on a computer. The native Telegram for Mac (a separate app, not Telegram Desktop) has a different path to the proxy.
There's one more detail that almost nobody writes about. By default Telegram Desktop uses your system's proxy settings, so a proxy can be turned on in Windows itself even though you never turned anything like that on in Telegram. You can look at it in Windows settings, in the network section, where there's an item about the proxy server. If you ever installed a program that sets a proxy in the system, I'm guessing the setting may have stayed behind after it, and Telegram has been going through it obediently ever since.
What the web version in your browser will tell you
Open web.telegram.org in your browser and sign in. The web version reaches Telegram through the browser, by a different route than the program, and it doesn't support proxies at all, so it's handy for telling a broken program apart from everything else.
If your chats opened in the browser, then your account is most likely fine, and Telegram is at least reachable from this network through a browser. In that case look in the program: its proxy, the system proxy, an old version or a frozen copy. But if the web version doesn't open either, while other sites do work, the cause is more likely the network than your computer. What to do then, and how to tell it isn't you, is in our general article on Telegram not working.
A white screen and other quirks of the web version itself I'm not covering here, that's a separate story.
What reinstalling and deleting tdata really do
As far as I understand, reinstalling over the top resets nothing. Telegram Desktop keeps its data in the tdata folder, and according to the code that's where both your login keys and the program's settings live, the proxy included. The installer, by all appearances, doesn't touch that folder, so after a reinstall you stay signed in, and the forgotten proxy stays turned on. In that case reinstalling will cure a broken or outdated program, but it won't save you from a proxy or from network problems.
The advice to delete tdata does sometimes help, and now it's clear why. Deleting that folder means signing out of Telegram on this computer and resetting all its settings, so along with everything else both the forgotten proxy and your login on this computer go away.
Secret chats deserve a separate mention. Telegram Desktop doesn't have them, but the native Telegram for Mac does, and Telegram's FAQ says plainly that they're tied to the device, aren't stored in the cloud and disappear when you log out. It also says that most people don't need to log out of Telegram at all. If you want to free up space, you can clear the cache without logging out: in the advanced settings of Telegram Desktop there's an item for managing local storage ("Manage local storage"), and Telegram itself warns that all media stays in the cloud and can be downloaded again.
If you did log out, getting back in is easier than it seems. The program shows a QR code, you scan it with the phone where you're already signed in to Telegram, and the login screen will tell you where to do that on your phone. The login code can also arrive in Telegram on your phone instead of by SMS. If it doesn't come at all, take a look at the article about the login code.
If the proxy is ours
And finally, about us. We sell personal proxies for Telegram, so I'm an interested party here, keep that in mind 🙂
If the proxy is ours and the indicator in the bottom left is spinning, first check whether your subscription has ended. When it ends, the link stops connecting, and Telegram keeps trying to connect through it. Then either renew the plan in your account or turn the proxy off in Telegram's settings. If you didn't turn on auto-renewal, nothing will be charged, because it's off by default.
FreeGate is a personal proxy for Telegram, and it works only inside Telegram, while your browser and other programs go online directly. Each device has its own link, and if it leaks, you can change it in your account with one tap, and the old one stops working at once. The proxy can't read your messages: Telegram itself encrypts them, and the proxy only passes the encrypted data along. You don't need a separate program: the site has a "Connect in Telegram" button, then Telegram itself asks about the proxy, and all that's left is to tap "Connect Proxy". The proxy works in the official Telegram apps for Windows, macOS and Linux (and on phones too), and the web version doesn't support proxies. If you're traveling or living in a country that restricts Telegram, the same steps apply.
You can try it for free at freegate.app/world: 1 day after you sign up with an email and confirm the address, no phone number needed, and nothing is charged on its own after the trial day. After that it's $1 for 30 days or $2.50 for 90 days, price per device, so a phone and a computer count as two devices.