Telegram founder and Chief executive officer, Pavel Durov said that the instant messaging app experienced a record increase in user registration and activity with over 70 million users joining the platform.
This development follows the massive outage which Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram experienced a few days ago that affected users globally. Facebook noted that the massive outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.
While the company suffered major losses, its competitors like Telegram added more users to their company.
What they are saying
Speaking on his platform’s sudden growth, Durov said, “The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in 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.
“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.”
He also added, ”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.”
As of early this year, Telegram had 500 million monthly active users, having just surpassed 1 billion downloads.
Signal has also gained new users. It said in a tweet yesterday that “millions of new users” had joined the app.
What you should know
- This is not the first time that Signal and Telegram have profited from the failure of their rival, WhatsApp.
- Signal and Telegram experienced a surge in downloads as more people sought other alternatives due to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy which disclosed that the messaging app was going to be sharing users’ personal information with Facebook.
