Six hours of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp not working globally affected more than just customers, it also hurt the three companies and Zuckerberg’s pockets. On the other hand, Telegram benefited from this outage as it received over 70 million new users in one day.
According to Telegram’s CEO on his channel (via TechCrunch), Telegram “welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day.” Pavel Durov praised its app for a “record increase in user registration and activity.”
He wrote:
“I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedent 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.”
Although people in the US and most 9to5Mac readers prefer iMessage, WhatsApp is the most important message app in other countries, such as Brazil. Every time Facebook services have an outage, people start to migrate to Telegram, but it’s been a while since the last massive migration happened.
Telegram’s fanbase praises some features that WhatsApp took a lot of time to implement – or never did at all, such as multi-device support, which is still being tested by the company.
With this outage, more than making a lot of people desperate, it opened another window for Telegram to take advantage of this migration, as its CEO wrote:
“I ask our existing users to say hi to their newly arrived friends, help them unpack, and let them know what we have in stock. make sure they stick around and see why Telegram is light years ahead of the competition.”
Whether all of these people will keep using Telegram daily, only time will tell. If Facebook will be extra cautious about another outage? For sure the company will.
What’s your favorite message app? Were you affect by yesterday’s outage? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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