I was working in Russian IT sector at the time when the government tried to block Telegram. For a few days we had some communication problems because we ised TG for all project chats and communication with most customers. We worked as contractors making an app with/for Mail Ru Group (now the whole company is rebranded as VK, but it’s actually a lot of different businesses). This is when I got to know that product manager I was working with was also the product manager for ICQ. And that we had to switch to fucking ICQ for daily conversations because that was their default backup method. Crazy!
I found out that it was facelifted up to the point where you couldn’t see the difference between it, TG or WhatsApp.
After about a week, TG was updated and it had a dynamic server connection (not a hardcoded one), so IP blocks stopped working and we returned to tg.
I still remember my number from the 2000s: 173114498. Though I lost access to that account a long time ago