TL;DR
- Telegram gained over 70 million users in one day, according to its founder.
- The disclosure comes after WhatsApp and other Facebook services were knocked offline this week.
A major outage affected Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Monday, leaving users unable to use these platforms for several hours. Naturally, users flocked to alternative messaging platforms, and it looks like Telegram was the big winner.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov claimed on his Telegram channel that the Facebook outage resulted in over 70 million people joining the platform in just one day.
“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,” Durov was quoted as saying on the channel.
The Telegram founder claimed that the service worked “flawlessly” for most users, but added that some people in the Americas may have seen slower speeds than usual due to the increased load.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the first time the platform has gained loads of users due to Facebook/WhatsApp dropping the ball. Facebook’s decision to change WhatsApp’s privacy policy in January resulted in a ton of users trying out Telegram. In fact, Durov reported that 25 million new users came aboard in just 72 hours.
