If you haven’t been hiding out under a rock for the past few years, you’re probably aware of the significant outage that Facebook had on Monday. For more than five hours, the global outage affected not just Facebook’s own service but also the networks it owns, such as Instagram and WhatsApp. While the outage caused significant problems for users, marketers, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Telegram, one of WhatsApp’s main rivals, added 70 million new members.
Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, released the information via his official Telegram channel. In his tweet, Durov claimed that on Monday, Telegram had a record-breaking rise in user registration and activity.
The CEO noted that Telegram’s daily growth rate was an order of magnitude higher than average, and in a single day, more than 70 million refugees from other platforms were welcomed.
Durov also praised his team for how they had managed the growth. He did note, however, that some American users encountered slower speeds than usual due to the fact that millions of new users from all countries and regions joined Telegram to meet their communication needs.
If you’re not aware, Telegram has been a tough competitor to WhatsApp from Facebook. To enhance the user experience and outplay its rival, the company has been adding a number of new features to its platform.
Additionally, this is not the first time Telegram has outperformed WhatsApp. When WhatsApp revealed its divisive policy in India last year, we observed a sharp increase in the number of downloads of Telegram and Signal on both the Google Play Store and the App Store. Therefore, the recent significant outage that WhatsApp experienced caused another increase for its competitors in the market.
