What you need to know
- Telegram founder Pavel Durov has revealed that the messaging app gained 70 million new users in one day after Facebook experienced a six-hour long outage.
- WhatsApp and Telegram rival Signal has also claimed to have gained "millions of new users."
- Durov has promised that Telegram won't fail its users like WhatsApp.
Popular messaging app Telegram experienced a record increase in new user registrations on Monday, shortly after Facebook experienced a massive outage that lasted nearly six hours. Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced on his Telegram channel that the app welcomed over 70 million users from "other platforms" in just one day.
I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users.For the new users I'd like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messaging platform. We won't fail you when others will.
Durov added that some of its users in the Americas experienced "slower speed than usual" as million of users rushed to the app from WhatsApp. Some Signal users also reported issues seeing all of their contacts due to the same reason.
Telegram isn't the only WhatsApp alternative that saw a massive increase in the number of new user registrations on Monday. Signal, which is one of the best Android messaging apps, also gained "millions of new people."
In an apology issued to its users, Facebook said that the outage was caused by "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic" between its data centers. The disruption to network traffic caused all major Facebook platforms to go down — including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Both Telegram and Signal had seen a similar increase in new users in January this year, after WhatsApp introduced a controversial privacy policy requiring users to share their data with Facebook.
Telegram surpassed the one billion downloads milestone in August this year, and had over 500 million monthly active users in January.
