Telegram adds 70 million users during WhatsApp and Facebook suffered outage

Telegram has gained from WhatsApp’s loss. In a global massive outage which lasted for over six hours WhatsApp was down for the entire duration. Taking advantage of the situation, Telegram added 70 million users. Not only WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram also suffered for six hours.

The social media company held a faulty configuration change as a reason for the outage that affected over 3.5 billion users across the globe. While Facebook’s outage might have incurred losses for the company, its rivals Telegram and Signal surely had a field day.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov revealed that the messaging app added 70 million users when Facebook and WhatsApp went down. “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,” Drove wrote on its Telegram channel.

Telegram has recently gained more than 1billion downloads and had 500 million active users. Apart from Telegram, Signal also gained some users during that period. The messaging apps saw an uptick in users when WhatsApp’s new privacy policy was under constant scrutiny. Telegram and Signal were deemed to be safer options as compared to WhatsApp.

About the outage, Facebook said, “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” The social media company also noted that it has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.