February 11, 2026
Telnet drama won’t log off
Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Users say Telnet never died; nostalgics cheer, security folks yell ‘use something safer’
TLDR: Terrace Networks says Telnet traffic didn’t vanish, likely a measurement glitch, not a big internet ban. Comments split between nostalgia and caution, with US users reporting no outages and Taiwan’s PTT forum proving the old-school login still matters.
Telnet, the old-school text window used to log into devices, was declared “dead” after a dramatic traffic drop spotted by GreyNoise right as a bug got named. Terrace Networks barged in with receipts, saying they still see real traffic and even ran traceroutes from the “affected” networks. Cue the comments: some rolled their eyes at the panic, others shouted, “if SSH exists, why are we still using Telnet?” and a loud crowd insisted the outage never hit their corner of the internet. The mood: RIP clickbait, Telnet lives.
One commenter linked classic drama “The Day the Telnet Died”, while another flexed global cred: Taiwan’s PTT BBS still runs over Telnet and is booming. The nostalgia crew cheered; the security crowd scolded, reminding that SSH is the safer, modern replacement. Meanwhile, Telnet BBS users shrugged: no outages, no panic, just more posts. There were jokes too—someone was “glad this one didn’t open with a song parody,” and yes, memes about zombie protocols walked in. Verdict from the peanut gallery: the sky isn’t falling, but maybe your measurement tools are. Terrace’s take: the sudden drop was likely a measurement blip or scanners dodging sensors, not a nationwide ban. Internet old-timers cackled. Loudly.
Key Points
- •Terrace Networks finds no evidence that core ISPs or ASes began filtering Telnet following CVE-2026-24061.
- •Telnet traceroutes from reportedly affected ASes to Terrace servers succeeded at 18:47 UTC, indicating reachability.
- •Terrace’s data shows continued, non-spoofable port 23 traffic from ASes where GreyNoise observed a 100% drop.
- •Methodology included filtering for completed TCP handshakes and counting source IPs, not total sessions.
- •Terrace suggests measurement artifacts or actor evasion may explain GreyNoise’s results; root cause cannot be confirmed without internal data.