Telegram Harvests 70 New Users When Facebook Service Shuts Down

JAKARTA - The outage of Facebook's social media services, namely WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger yesterday, made users migrate to other messaging services to be able to communicate, one of which was Telegram.

Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said that his instant messaging app gained a staggering 70 million additional users yesterday. He described it as a record increase in user registrations and activity for the service.

"Telegram's daily growth rate exceeds the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed more than 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day," Durov said on his Telegram channel as quoted by Techcrunch, Wednesday, October 6.

"Some users in America may experience slower than usual speeds as millions of users from this continent rush to sign up for Telegram at the same time," he added.

Telegram, which recently hit 1 billion downloads, had 500 million monthly active users at the start of this year. Not only has Telegram benefited, WhatsApp's other rival messaging app Signal has also added new users. In a tweet, Signal's official account stated that millions of new users had joined the app.

This is not the first time Telegram and Signal have won at the expense of their main rival. The two added millions of users earlier this year as well as WhatsApp struggled to explain exactly what its new privacy policy meant.

Previously reported, users can not access services owned by Facebook for six hours. It impacted 3.5 billion users, due to incorrect configuration changes. However, this event did not occur due to hackers, and all user data is safe.