Monday, October 4 was an unfortunate day if you relied on any Facebook services for communication. For hours on Monday, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all inaccessible to users. The issue was eventually resolved, but it left thousands of people without access to some of the most popular internet services for much of the day.
Of course, if your go-to messaging service takes a dive, you don’t stop messaging; you find another messaging app that works. And that appears to be what a lot of people did.
Telegram, one of our favorite messaging apps, gained over 70 million users just one day after the Facebook outage. These 70 million people might not be newly converted Telegram diehards (their switch might be temporary or short-lived), but even so, those numbers are astounding.
But Telegram is just one of the recommended alternatives worth using. Signal, an app known for its end-to-end encryption and various privacy features, likely gained many users during the Facebook outage, as well.
Did you switch to Telegram or Signal during the Facebook/WhatsApp outage? Were you already using one of these services? Or did you sit idly by while Zuckerberg was scrambling around, trying to fix his apps? Cast your vote in the poll above; we’d love to hear your thoughts.
