Telegram webhooks not arriving at tunnels in the RU region

Recently many users have been reporting the same issue: webhooks from api.telegram.org stopped arriving at tunnels in the RU region. This post explains how to quickly work around the problem by switching the tunnel to a different region.

The problem

The symptoms are:

• a bot registered via setWebhook stopped receiving updates;
• requests from api.telegram.org don't reach the tunnel in the RU region — they're not visible in the client logs or in the Request Inspector;
• the tunnel itself works fine: requests from a browser and other services go through normally.

There are no restrictions on our side or from our hosting provider in Russia — the tunnel is operating normally and we can see the established connection. The issue is somewhere in the backbone between Telegram's infrastructure and our RU nodes; most likely it's a restriction on the ISP/regulatory side. We can't influence this, but the tunnel's connection region is a client-side parameter, and changing it takes seconds.

Solution — change the tunnel region

The quickest way is to start the tunnel in a different region, for example nl (Netherlands). The full list of available regions and all ways to override them are in the documentation.

Tuna Desktop

When creating a tunnel, select the region in the Region dropdown:

After saving, the tunnel will start in the selected region — Telegram webhooks will start arriving.

Command line

Pass the region with the --location argument (or short -l):

tuna http 8080 --location=nl
tuna http 8080 -l nl

To avoid specifying the flag every time, you can set a default region in one of three ways.

The tuna config save-location command — saves the value to the config file:

tuna config save-location nl

A parameter in the config file directly:

location: nl

Environment variable TUNA_LOCATION:

TUNA_LOCATION=nl

What's next

After changing the region, the tunnel URL will change — don't forget to update the webhook address in your Telegram bot settings (setWebhook method with the new URL).

If webhooks still don't arrive after this — reach out to us in the Telegram community or at info@tuna.am.

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