Against the background of the day before yesterday a global failure in the work of Facebook services, as a result of which the social network of the same name, the Instagram platform and the WhatsApp messenger did not work for several hours, the Telegram user audience grew by 70 million people according to the founder of the messenger Pavel Durov.
Telegram got 70 million new users due to the Facebook outage
“Yesterday Telegram experienced a record increase in user registration and activity”. “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. I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time”.
The founder of the messenger noted that he is proud of how the Telegram team has managed to cope with the unprecedented growth of the user audience. The platform continued to operate normally “for the vast majority of users”. According to available data, some users from North and South America may have encountered a low speed of the messenger, which is due to the fact that “millions of people from these continents rushed to register in Telegram”.
Gizchina News of the week
Recall that on the evening of October 4, the WhatsApp messenger; as well as the social networks Facebook and Instagram, experienced a global failure; due to which the mentioned services did not function for six hours. The head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, apologized to users for the inconvenience, and the engineers of the IT giant explained the failure by incorrect configuration changes of the backbone routers.
Millions of users switched to Signal
Facebook shares plummeted after the global shutdown of the company’s servers and subsidiaries yesterday evening; but this is not the only consequence of the disruption. Within a few hours, millions of users left Facebook and its subsidiary services for other messengers.
According to Edward Snowden, millions of new users have joined Signal messenger, which is very similar in functionality to WhatsApp. According to Sensor Tower, the messenger quickly surpassed 55 apps in the download chart; temporarily topping the list of iOS software downloads.
We know that the six-hour Facebook failure affected the company’s most popular messenger WhatsApp; as well as Instagram, depriving the usual services of about 2.7 billion users.
Facebook’s losses have led to growth for other social media. Twitter has seen a huge influx of visitors; and its CEO Jack Dorsey has also endorsed Signal as a viable alternative to WhatsApp. Thousands of new audio chats have also appeared on the Clubhouse network, mainly discussing the incident.
Signal traditionally claims that the messenger does not collect data about users; therefore it is resistant to pressure from any government; the owners have almost no data that they can disclose to the authorities.
