Messaging app Telegram gained over 70 million new users during Monday’s Facebook outage, its founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday, as people worldwide were left without key messaging services for nearly six hours which is quite the slap in the face of Facebook owned WhatsApp:
Facebook blamed its outage, which kept its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change. “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 wrote on his Telegram channel. Durov said some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but that the service worked as usual for the majority.
Now some of these users will flip back to WhatsApp, but I am willing to bet that many won’t. Which means that Facebook who owns WhatsApp is sweating bullets right now. Sucks to be them.