Telegram was the big winner of Facebook's massive, multi-hour outage
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Telegram was the big winner of Facebook's massive, multi-hour outage
Published 5 hours ago
The platform got a massive uptick in users while WhatsApp was dead
It almost felt as society plunged into chaos as Facebook's servers went out yesterday and didn't come back up until several hours later, bringing down Instagram and WhatsApp along with it. The outage affected billions of people and made them scramble to look for an alternative to reach their friends and acquaintances. The result? The competing messaging app Telegram saw a massive increase in users during those downtime hours.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov shared on his official Telegram channel that over 70 million people joined Telegram yesterday. Given that the service had just over 500 million monthly active users as of January 2021, 70 million people installing the app on one single day is pretty significant.
The flood of users was so big that Telegram's servers struggled to keep up with people joining through the Facebook outage, although they never actually went down completely — users simply experienced slowdowns in sending and receiving messages.
Earlier this year, Telegram also experienced an uptick in sign-ups, caused then by WhatsApp announcing changes in its terms of service that didn't sit well with users. That influx of new users was a little more sustained, while this newer flood of users was caused by WhatsApp and co. being completely dead for a few hours. In any case, it's safe to say 2021 has been an excellent year for Telegram so far.
Signal, another messaging app alternative, hasn't shared exact figures regarding downloads and sign-ups, but the company tweeted that "millions of new people have joined Signal" and that some experienced smaller issues due to the sudden increase of users. Edward Snowden and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted their endorsement of the app during the Facebook outage, which probably contributed to the influx of signups.
Millions of new people have joined Signal today and our messaging and calling have been up and running but some people aren't seeing all of their contacts appear on Signal. We're working hard to fix this up.
— Signal (@signalapp) October 4, 2021
It's likely that a lot of these users signed up for Telegram and Signal as a stopgap solution until WhatsApp was fixed, but even if that's the case, it further positions the apps as strong alternatives. Will they be able to take over in terms of market share? It's probably unlikely in the near future, but with Signal's strong focus on privacy and Telegram's wide feature set compared to WhatsApp, they're compelling candidates to do so.
About The Author
Arol Wright (62 Articles Published)
Arol is a tech journalist and contributor at Android Police. He has also worked as a news/feature writer at XDA-Developers and Pixel Spot. Currently a Pharmacy student, Arol has had a soft spot for everything tech-related since he was a child. When not writing, you'll either find him nose-deep into his textbooks or playing video games.
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