---
title: Telegram Uptime Bot & Downtime Alerts
description: Website downtime alerts in Telegram through the official @WatchForAlertsBot. No bot to build — say hello, paste your chat ID, done.
canonical: https://watchfor.io/integrations/telegram
---

[← All alert channels](/integrations)

# A Telegram uptime bot you do not have to build

Most guides to Telegram alerting start with 'create a bot with BotFather'. You do not have to. We run the official @WatchForAlertsBot, so setup is saying hello to it and pasting the chat ID it gives you — under a minute, and it works for a private chat, a group or a channel.

[Start free](/auth/signup)[Setup guide](/docs/notifications/telegram)

## Setting it up

Official @WatchForAlertsBot — no bot-building .

- 1 Open @WatchForAlertsBot in Telegram and send it a message, or add it to the group or channel that should receive alerts.
- 2 Paste the chat ID into Alerting → Channels & contacts → Add Channel → Telegram.
- 3 Attach contact groups and send a test.

The full procedure, including every optional field, is in the [setup guide](/docs/notifications/telegram).

## What the alert looks like in Telegram

A formatted message with the incident title, the diagnosis, Expected vs Detected values, the target, severity, start time, the confirming locations and a link to the incident.

## Specific to Telegram

- No BotFather, no token to keep secret, no bot of your own to host.
- Works for a private chat, a group or a broadcast channel.
- Free on every plan, like every other channel.

## True of every channel

- Alerts fire on confirmed incidents, not on a single failed check, so one blip from one probe does not wake anyone.
- During a storm, several incidents inside the grouping window arrive as one summary rather than as twenty separate messages.
- Recovery closes the same thread it opened, with the outage duration attached.
- Every channel is on every plan, including the free one. There is no per-channel upsell.

## Questions people ask

Do I need to create my own Telegram bot? No. @WatchForAlertsBot is ours and already running. You only supply the chat ID of the conversation the alerts should go to.

Can a whole team receive them? Yes — add the bot to a Telegram group and use that group's chat ID. Everyone in the group gets the alert.

Is Telegram reliable enough to be paged on? For a small team, usually. For a rota where someone is contractually on call, pair it with PagerDuty or Opsgenie and our own on-call schedules, which escalate until someone acknowledges.

## Wire it up in a few minutes

15 monitors free, every alert channel included, no card required.

[Start free](/auth/signup)[See all channels](/integrations)

---

Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/integrations/telegram · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt