WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram were all down for hours on Monday. This global outage not only cost Facebook billions of dollars but also boosted rival platforms. Telegram reportedly gained seventy million new users as people looked for WhatsApp’s alternative messaging service.
Telegram gained 70 million new users in a day in the middle of WhatsApp six hours long global outage
TechCrunch reports that Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov confirmed that his messaging app gained saw a “record increase in user registration and activity” with 70 million new users. He wrote:
“I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedent 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.”
In addition, another competing app, Signal also added millions of new users on the day when Facebook’s main apps were non-functional. This is the second time when Telegram and Signal have benefited from WhatsApp’s misfortune. Earlier this year, when WhatsApp announced a controversial privacy update that would have shared users’ data with its parent company, Facebook, millions of people switched to Telegram and Signal from around the world. The large user drain forced Facebook to abandon the privacy update.
“The smallest of events helped trigger the largest of outcomes,” said Brian Acton, the executive chairman of Signal’s holding company, of WhatsApp’s debacle earlier this year, in an interview with TechCrunch.
In its initial report on the cause of the global outage, Facebook said that a single mistake brought its service to a halt. The company explained that it has systems to prevent audit commands that could take down the entire network but a bug represented the audit tool to effectively that command.
