Technical

How TGFast Achieves 99.9% Uptime

A look behind the scenes at how we keep our Telegram proxy fleet reliably available.

MTProto Proxy Engineers · Censorship Circumvention Researchers

Published April 27, 2026 Updated May 15, 2026 8 min read 316 words

What 99.9% means

99.9% uptime allows for roughly 8.76 hours of downtime per year on any given server. We typically achieve 99.94% (about 5.25 hours per server) across the fleet thanks to defensive infrastructure, and most users never notice a hiccup because they keep several proxies saved.

Multiple providers

Our multiple proxies are spread across several different VPS providers in different countries. A single provider outage takes down only a small slice of the fleet. For users with several proxies saved, this is barely noticeable.

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Health check loops

Each server is monitored from three independent locations with a TCP-level handshake check every 30 seconds. If a server fails three consecutive checks, it is marked degraded in our internal status board. After 5 minutes degraded, we trigger automated replacement (spin up a new VPS, configure mtg, swap DNS).

DNS-based failover

TGFast hostnames (e.g. your TGFast card hostname) point to the canonical IP via low-TTL A records (300 seconds). When we replace a server, the DNS update propagates in under 5 minutes. Existing connections may briefly fail; clients reconnect automatically.

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IP rotation

Even when a server is healthy, we proactively rotate its public IP every 30-60 days to stay ahead of long-tail blocking. Rotation is a 10-minute window of brief connection interruption. We pre-announce in @FastTGProxyMT.

Hardware

Each server runs on at least 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM, even though current load needs less. Headroom matters: when one server goes down, the rest of the fleet absorbs its users without throttling.

Software stack

mtg (the proxy daemon) on Debian Stable + Docker. Updated monthly. We pin to specific mtg versions and audit changelogs before upgrading.

Past incidents

In the past 12 months we have had two incidents exceeding 1 hour: a Hetzner network event (90 minutes, affected one proxy only), and an unplanned mtg restart bug we fixed within 2 hours. Both were posted in our channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is MTProto different from SOCKS5 or Shadowsocks?

MTProto is Telegram's native protocol, so traffic looks indistinguishable from a normal Telegram connection to deep packet inspection. SOCKS5 is a generic proxy with a recognizable handshake; Shadowsocks adds obfuscation but still requires the operator to defend their port and keys against probing. MTProto with Fake-TLS adds a TLS-1.3-mimicking handshake that has proven the hardest of the three to fingerprint.

Why does the secret start with "dd" or "ee"?

The leading byte is a magic prefix that tells the Telegram client which obfuscation mode to negotiate. "dd" enables MTProto 2.0 random padding to defeat traffic analysis; "ee" indicates Fake-TLS mode where the entire session is wrapped in a TLS 1.3 handshake. Both are interoperable with all modern Telegram clients.

Can a network operator detect that I am using an MTProto proxy?

A determined operator can sometimes flag suspicious flows by timing analysis, but the encrypted payload itself is opaque. Fake-TLS makes detection significantly harder because the handshake mimics a real HTTPS site (including SNI, ALPN and certificate exchange). Even when flagged, blocking is per-IP, not per-protocol — which is why TGFast rotates IPs continuously.

Does an MTProto proxy add real cryptography or only obfuscation?

Both. The MTProto 2.0 transport adds AES-256-IGE encryption between client and server with per-session keys derived from the shared secret, and Fake-TLS wraps that channel inside a real TLS 1.3 handshake. Even if the proxy operator were malicious, they could not decrypt the inner Telegram session — that key is negotiated end-to-end with Telegram's data centres.

How does TGFast pick which servers to deploy and where?

We monitor latency and packet loss from probe nodes in 14 cities across the regions hit hardest by Telegram restrictions. New servers are spun up where the median latency to nearby ISPs falls below 80 ms and where the upstream provider has historically resisted ISP take-down requests. Capacity is rebalanced weekly.