Telegram added 70 million users during Facebook-WhatsApp outage, says its CEO

While social media major Facebook’s outage on Monday left millions of people disconnected for almost six hours, it was the turn of its rival messaging platform Telegram to rejoice as it managed to garner over 70 million new users.

“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,” said Pavel Durov, Founder, Telegram.

Durov on his Telegram channel mentioned that even though some users in the US might have experienced slower speeds due to the load by millions trying to sign on to the platform and go back online, for most users, the services ran just fine.

“I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users,” he added.

“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.”

Users scrambled to alternatives such as Telegram and even Signal when WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram were down.