greatfire

It's the latter - Apple will let the authorities access messages. Telegram will not. And simply blocking the Telegram website does not mean that the app won't continue to function in China. Which is why the authorities likely decided to launch a DDoS attack, so they could silence the human rights lawyers that were using it to communicate.

I could replace it with DuckDuckGo except it's not blocked. Maybe I should replace it with Facebook or Twitter, yeah?

It's not a "let's promote Google" thing. It's a "let's show the authorities that they cannot block every site" thing. For most people, Tor does not work in China.