Telegram was not disrupted during the AWS crash, so they probably were not using it (or had a decent fail-over mechanism to a backup system). Telegram's user-base is two orders of magnitude larger than Signal, so 'we use AWS because we have to' argument clearly is bogus and nonsense.
Despite there founder crying on twitter[1] how horrible and distopian chat control client side scanning to bypass E2EE would be, telegram is still only offering hidden and limited opt-in E2EE instead of making it global default like signal.
How would you know this? If they access the data from the platforms server you would never know unlike with obvious forceful physical seazure. The point of E2EE is that the weakest link, the server, is removed. It increases the required threat model from simple dragnet surveillance to high effort targeted attacks. If the client is insecure nothing can protect your data and signal has said that many times.
I don't see how the debate about requiring a phone number is relevant to this discussion since telegram does too.
The weakest link is not the server. The weakest link is the user device. There is no security without anonymity.
>There is no security without anonymity.
You don't understand what these words mean. You can be surveilled 100% by bodyguards and cameras to be secure but have 0% anonymity (or privacy).
It is more of a question, who would you rather read your messages ? USA or Russia ?
Because even if there is E2E encryption and an open source client, unless you review it and compile it yourself, there is nothing to say that your messages are relayed to some agency's datacenter after decryption. The USA has all the legal framework necessary to achieve that with the tremendous power of the "intelligence" agencies, and Russia.. well.. doesn't even need that.
The public-facing story around Telegram is performative PR, which could be explained by the exact reasons listed in the parent comments: association with the Russian state had hindered VK growth besides the CIS region.