Telegram garnered 70 million new users while Whatsapp was down for 6 hours.
The app has crossed the 1 billion downloads mark, and has 500 million active users.
There’s no data on whether these users migrated back to Whatsapp once the app was back up.
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram suffered a global outage that lasted over six hours on Monday evening. During this outage, one of Whatsapp’s biggest rivals, Telegram, saw 70 million new users sign up over the span of 6-7 hours. While Facebook reportedly lost 6 Billion USD during the outage, the likelihood of its losses to increase is high if users continue to adopt Telegram over its products. Telegram also shot to popularity earlier this year when WhatsApp’s privacy features came under scrutiny.
Telegram celebrates while Whatsapp is down
Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, broke the news about Telegram’s new users when Whatsapp was down. “I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” Drove wrote on his Telegram channel.
Addressing the outage, Facebook said, “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Of course, a random surge in downloads and sign-ups may be cause for momentary happiness, but what remains to be seen is whether users stick to Telegram and Signal or migrate back to Whatsapp now that the app is up and running again.
Also Read: Telegram Messenger update adds new features like Payments 2.0 and much more
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Kajoli Anand Puri
Kajoli is a tech-enthusiast with a soft-spot for smart kitchen and home appliances. She loves exploring gadgets and gizmos that are designed to make life simpler, but also secretly fears a world run by AI. Oh wait, we’re already there. View Full Profile
