Telegram has just surpassed 500 million active users

If anyone is pleased about WhatsApp’s new terms and conditions change it’s the folks over at Telegram. A notification update was sent out last night via Telegram announcing that the instant messaging app had surpassed 500 million active users. It makes sense that such a milestone would be reached this week given how WhatsApp’s experiencing an exodus of users as the updated terms of services require folks to share their data with Facebook or get off the app entirely.

Within the same update, Telegram confirmed that within the past 72 hours, more than 25 million signed up for the app. That’s… staggering. While not all of those users joined with the intention of flipping off WhatsApp, it’s safe to say that the majority were probably doing just that. The timing of such an influx of users doesn’t really leave one much room to ponder.

How much for a Telegram?

It’s no secret that messaging apps that aren’t WhatsApp have seen a boom in recent days. Signal also recently saw a massive wave of new users and while we knew both messaging apps were doing well, the scale of their growth is exponential. Speaking of Telegram, on Monday we published a story about the surge of users on the platform: Over a week since WhatsApp announced the policy change Telegram was met with 2.2 million new users.

Yet that number multiplied by twelve in the last three days alone. If that’s not an indication of how fed up people are with WhatsApp and Facebook we don’t know what is. If you’re apprehensive about making the jump to Telegram, we wrote up a list of features that really make the app worthwhile.

Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, wrote in his channel yesterday, “People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users.”

Oh, and if you’re still looking into deleting WhatsApp but are unsure of how to go about it, we also have a quick guide on that right here. There’s never been a better time to move on!