Apple temporarily removed Telegram's official app from its iOS App Store due to "inappropriate content" being made public amid the launch of the experimental app called Telegram X on Wednesday, Engadget reported.
The disappearance of both apps first came to light in a Reddit thread, where some speculated whether it was related to the launch of Telegram X, which is in testing.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov addressed the issue on Twitter, noting that Apple had alerted the company to inappropriate content that was made available to users.
While it is not clear what that content was, both apps were subsequently removed from the App Store, with Telegram being brought back on Thursday.
Telegram was launched in 2013 as a way "to build a means of communication that can't be accessed by the Russian security agencies," Durov said, according to The Verge.
However, the app has been heavily criticized by government officials who feel it is becoming "the app for terrorists" due to its secretive nature.
Last year Russia's FSB security service said the Telegram app provided "terrorists with the opportunity to create secret chat rooms with a high degree of encryption," according to Fortune.
This came after a suicide bomber, who killed 15 people on the St. Petersburg metro, used the app to plan the attack with accomplices.
In a separate incident following last year's suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, in which 23 people were killed and at least 59 injured, the app was flooded with pro-terrorism messages from ISIS supporters, The HuffPost reported.
"We've seen a clear trend of growing use of Telegram by almost all terror groups all over the world," Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel and author on online extremism, told The HuffPost.
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