Monday may have been a bit of a nightmare for Facebook and a headache for its users, but it seems it was nothing but blue skies for competing messenger apps. One such app, Telegram, enjoyed a massive boom of new users while the big, blue social media goliath was on its knees. Around 70 million of them, to be precise.
Facebook’s loss is Telegram’s gain
In case you somehow missed it, Facebook faced a massive outage on Monday evening, which dominoed into WhatsApp and Instagram being out of commission too. This is why you don’t lump everything into one giant online service. This left the platform’s 3 billion users stranded for hours.
Telegram had an absolute field day with the absence of the dominant messaging service and its relatives. CEO Pavel Durov took to his Telegram channel to express his delight at the app’s welcoming of 70 million new users, which he also announced was “a record increase in user registration and activity.”
Now, that kind of sudden expansion doesn’t come without its growing pains, and Durov does admit that the messaging platform experienced a few hiccups, such as significantly slower speeds for some, while its servers were flooding with new users.
That said, Durov says he’s, “proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of [its] users.”
Durov closes with a warm welcome to new users and a light jab at his competitors.
“For the new users I’d like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messaging platform. We won’t fail you when others will.”
