You turn on your VPN, the icon at the top of your phone is lit, and Telegram still keeps spinning on "Connecting...". You turn the VPN off and on again, you restart the phone, and nothing changes. When Telegram won't work with a VPN, it's hard to tell from the outside which of the two to blame.

Let me say up front that I sell proxies for Telegram, so keep that in mind as you read. About the VPN I'll only talk about what you can see from Telegram's side and the phone's side, and I won't give tips on setting up a VPN. I'll tell you about us at the end, briefly.

First of all, Telegram itself doesn't forbid VPNs. Its proxy help page says plainly that if you already use a VPN you trust, you can keep doing so. I also looked through Telegram's open-source code for Android and found no place where the app checks whether a VPN is on, and the word itself appears only in the part that handles calls.

First, look at what Telegram says at the top

When Telegram on your phone can't connect, it says so at the top, where the name usually is. On Android that's "Connecting..." or "Connecting to proxy...", and on iPhone it's just "Connecting...", even when Telegram goes through a proxy. Telegram on a computer shows nothing at the top: a small icon spins at the bottom left, in the corner of the chat list, and you see "Connecting..." when you hover the mouse over it.

The second message is the most useful one, I think. It means Telegram isn't simply going online, it's going to a specific proxy saved in its settings. If you see "Connecting to proxy...", a proxy is turned on in Telegram, and the VPN is no longer the main suspect. iPhone has no such message, so there it's easier to look straight into the proxy settings described below.

If Android shows "Waiting for network...", the phone most likely thinks there's no network at all. And if Telegram doesn't work without a VPN either, that's a different story and needs to be sorted out separately.

A proxy you forgot about long ago

Telegram follows its own connection settings, not the VPN icon. In the Android code you can see this directly. If a proxy is turned on in the settings, Telegram passes its address, port and secret to its network module at startup, and there's no "only if the VPN is off" condition there. The setting also applies to all accounts in the app at once.

Say someone once sent you a proxy link, you tapped "Connect Proxy" and forgot about it. Now your VPN is on, but Telegram still goes to that same old proxy, and the VPN just carries the connection to it. If the proxy died long ago (the link expired, or its owner turned it off or deleted it), Telegram won't connect no matter how often you switch the VPN.

It's easy to check, you just need to turn off the proxy in Telegram itself:

  1. Android: "Settings" → "Data and Storage" → "Proxy Settings", the "Use Proxy" switch.
  2. iPhone: in the settings, in the data and storage section, there's a "Proxy" screen at the bottom with the same "Use Proxy" switch.
  3. Computer (Telegram Desktop): "Settings" → "Advanced" → "Connection type" → "Disable proxy".

Then look at Telegram again, with the same VPN as before. If the message changed and the chats loaded, the old proxy was the problem.

And if you no longer remember where that proxy came from, there's even less reason to keep it in your settings. The proxy owner can't read your messages, but they can see which IP connects to them and when, which is why Telegram advises using proxies only from people you trust. What a proxy actually does in Telegram is covered in a separate article.

And if Telegram won't connect on a computer

Telegram for computers has three connection modes: "Disable proxy", "Use system proxy settings" and "Use custom proxy". By default, the system one is selected.

That means Telegram checks whether a proxy is set in the system itself. Some other program may have left one there at some point, and if that proxy doesn't work, Telegram will hang on connecting with any VPN. If Telegram on your computer stubbornly won't connect, open "Connection type" and see what's selected. In this mode Telegram doesn't show in any way that it goes through a proxy, so from the outside everything looks like the usual "Connecting...". To check, you can select "Disable proxy". And this is a lively spot, by the way: the developers fixed how the system proxy works on Windows in version 6.9.2 in June 2026.

The VPN icon is lit, but does Telegram go through it

The icon and the system notification on Android only tell you that a VPN connection exists. They don't tell you which apps go through it.

The thing is, a VPN on Android applies to all apps by default, but the VPN app itself can set a list: only these apps, or all except these. The rest then go online as if the VPN weren't running. I can't know how yours is set up, and what to change in it is up to whoever provides that VPN.

The same Android code has one more small detail. Only one VPN connection can run there at a time, and when a new one starts, the old one is turned off. So two VPN apps on one phone knock each other out, and the icon may be lit by a different one than you're counting on.

Sometimes the VPN itself doesn't get through, and then the question is for the VPN, not for Telegram or the phone.

And now about us, as promised

FreeGate works only inside Telegram. Your browser and other apps go online directly, as usual, so your banking app and everything else opens just like always. The proxy is built into Telegram itself, there's nothing to turn on and off and no separate app: you just tap "Connect in Telegram" or scan the QR code, then Telegram asks about the proxy and you tap "Connect Proxy".

Each device gets 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. We can't see your messages, because Telegram encrypts them itself and the proxy only passes on data that's already encrypted. And to be honest about what we talked about above: if your subscription ends, our link stops connecting, and Telegram will keep trying to connect through it until you renew the plan or turn the proxy off in the settings. Nothing gets charged on its own.

You can try it for free first: 1 day after you sign up with an email and confirm your address, with no payment, no phone number and no automatic charges. After that it's $1.00 for 30 days or $2.50 for 90 days, price per device, so for a phone and a computer you choose 2 when buying. FreeGate works in the official Telegram apps for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, while Telegram Web doesn't support proxies. Details at freegate.app/world.