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How to use Telegram in Vietnam after the June 2025 block

Fexyn Team··6 min read
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If you are in Vietnam and Telegram suddenly stopped working, this is what happened.

On May 21, 2025, the Department of Telecommunications under Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications ordered the major carriers to block Telegram. The block took effect on June 2, 2025. Roughly 11.8 million Vietnamese users were on Telegram at the time. As of May 2026, the block has held — Telegram is unreachable from Viettel, VNPT, FPT, and MobiFone networks without a VPN.

The good news is that Vietnam's blocking is mostly DNS- and IP-based rather than the kind of deep packet inspection you see in Russia or Iran, so any VPN that gets you out of Vietnam restores Telegram. The fix takes about five minutes.

Why Telegram got blocked

The cited reason was Telegram's failure to comply with content takedown requests under Decree 53/2022/ND-CP, which requires foreign internet platforms with Vietnamese users to:

  • Store Vietnamese-user data inside Vietnam
  • Comply with takedown orders within 24 hours
  • Verify identity for social media accounts

Per The Diplomat reporting from June 2025, MIC had been escalating compliance demands on Telegram for several months. Telegram declined to comply with the identity-verification and data-localisation requirements. The block followed.

The same regulatory framework affects other foreign platforms; most of them comply. Facebook complies aggressively. YouTube complies. Telegram is the high-profile non-complier and the block is the consequence.

How the block actually works

Vietnamese carriers do not run national-scale deep packet inspection on the China or Iran model. Most blocking happens at the ISP DNS layer (DNS lookups for telegram.org return nothing or return a sinkhole IP) and at the gateway router level (telegram.org's known IP ranges are blackholed).

Both of these are trivial for a VPN to bypass. The DNS lookup happens on the VPN provider's resolvers (in our case, in Frankfurt or Cyprus, not on Viettel). The traffic exits to Telegram's servers from the VPN provider's IP, not from a Vietnamese IP, so the gateway-level IP block does not apply.

This is different from Russia or Iran, where TSPU and the Filtering Resistance Agency block VPN protocols themselves at the packet level. In Vietnam, the VPN protocol does not need to be DPI-resistant. Standard WireGuard works fine.

What you need

A VPN that:

  1. Has servers outside Vietnam (any reasonable provider does)
  2. Does not log your traffic (Vietnam's data-localisation requirements do not apply if your VPN provider is outside the country, but logged traffic is still a privacy problem)
  3. Connects reliably from Viettel, VNPT, FPT, and MobiFone (most do — the carriers block specific destinations, not VPN traffic)
  4. Has a desktop and mobile app you can install before the carrier-level block extends to VPN provider websites

We are biased about which VPN to recommend (it is ours), but the technical answer is genuinely permissive here. Most major VPN brands work in Vietnam.

Setting it up with Fexyn

Five steps, about five minutes:

1. Sign up at fexyn.com/pricing. Vietnam is Tier 4, $2.99/month on the longest commitment. The 7-day free trial does not require a card. If you are running on the trial, you do not need to do anything else here.

2. Install the desktop or mobile app from fexyn.com/download. Vietnamese carriers do not currently block fexyn.com, so you can do this from inside Vietnam. (Caveat: this could change at any time. Install before you need it.)

3. Open the app and connect. The app picks Fexyn Bolt (WireGuard) by default. Frankfurt or Helsinki are the closest server locations from Vietnam, typically 180-220ms from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Cyprus is sometimes faster from southern Vietnam.

4. Open Telegram. Telegram should work immediately. If you had previously opened the app and it failed to connect, force-quit and reopen.

5. (Optional) Switch protocols if needed. On a clean Viettel or VNPT connection, Bolt is enough. If your specific connection is on a more aggressive carrier filtering profile, switch to Fexyn Stealth (VLESS Reality with Vision flow) in app settings. Stealth adds about 100ms of handshake but routes around any future protocol-level filtering. Why Reality matters technically if you want the detail.

That is the whole setup.

VPN use in Vietnam is legal for individuals. The 2018 Cybersecurity Law and Decree 53/2022 impose data-localisation, takedown-compliance, and identity-verification requirements on platforms — not on end users. There are no published cases of Vietnamese individuals being prosecuted for using a VPN.

The regulatory pressure is on platforms to comply, which is why Telegram was blocked. Telegram declined to verify users; the consequence fell on the platform's reachability, not on Vietnamese users.

What you do through a VPN can still create exposure. Posting content that violates Article 16 of the 2018 Cybersecurity Law ("anti-state" content, defamation, certain commercial offences) is illegal whether you use a VPN or not. The VPN does not affect the legal status of the content; it only routes the connection. Be honest with yourself about what you are using it for.

Why this matters beyond Telegram

The June 2025 block was Vietnam's most public test of the Decree 53 enforcement framework. The pattern is likely to repeat as other platforms decline to comply with future takedown demands. Signal, foreign-language news platforms, and any messaging service with end-to-end encryption that complicates content moderation are plausible future targets.

If you depend on a platform that has not been blocked yet, having a VPN already installed and tested is cheap insurance. The pattern in Vietnam (and similar regulatory contexts like Pakistan in late 2025) is that providers go from working to blocked within days of a regulatory decision. Installing a VPN after the block is published is harder than installing it before.

Try Fexyn free for 7 days — Tier 4 pricing for Vietnam, no card required for the trial. The Vietnam country page has more detail on Vietnamese carriers and the regulatory framework. The VLESS Reality protocol guide explains why we ship Stealth as a fallback even in markets where standard WireGuard works fine — the regulatory direction is toward more aggressive filtering, and the protocol that survives that filtering is worth keeping in the toolkit.

How to use Telegram in Vietnam after the June 2025 block | Fexyn VPN