WhatsApp’s Outage Is Telegram’s Gain

If you’ve been following the news, chances are you’ve heard about or experienced the outage that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went through. While it was only down for a few hours, given the millions of people using these apps, those few hours felt like an eternity of not being able to send or receive messages.

However, it seems that WhatsApp’s outage proved to be beneficial to Telegram, WhatsApp’s rival in the messaging space. According to a post by Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov on his channel, it seems that the outage resulted in the platform gaining as many as 70 million new users.

According to the post, “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.”

It is possible that some of the new users were signing up regardless of WhatsApp’s online status, but we reckon that the need to keep in touch probably fueled a lot of the new signups as well. Whether or not these new users will continue using the platform or if they were simply looking for a temporary alternative is unclear.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: telegram, Whatsapp