Telegram gained 70 million users thanks to WhatsApp crash

Telegram is the big winner in the global WhatsApp outage. While Facebook’s instant messaging was completely inaccessible, the secure app gained over 70 million users in a single day.

This Monday, October 4, 2021, all Facebook services suffered a major outage. For several long hours, all of the group’s networks and applications were down. This is particularly the case of WhatsApp, the messaging application acquired by Facebook in 2014.

Deprived of any means of communication, WhatsApp users have turned to competing solutions, like Telegram. The Russian messaging app has seen a colossal increase in its traffic. Faced with this unexpected influx, Telegram encountered some malfunctions.

Telegram momentarily picks up refugees from WhatsApp

Nevertheless, the courier service has largely taken advantage of the situation to inflate its fleet of users. “Telegram has seen a record increase in signups and user activity. Telegram’s daily growth rate exceeded the norm, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day ”, welcomes Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram. However, we imagine that many users returned to WhatsApp as soon as the failure has been completed.

“Some users in America may have encountered a slower connection speed than usual, as millions of users from other continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time”, tempers the founder of the messaging, assuring however that “Telegram continued to function perfectly for the vast majority of our users ”.

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This is not the first time that Telegram recovers part of WhatsApp users. At the start of the year, the Russian application had already gained 25 million British users in the space of three weeks. Telegram even climbed to number one in downloads in January 2021, across all platforms, ahead of Signal and TikTok. The service was taking advantage of the outcry caused by the new WhatsApp terms of use. To continue to attract new users, Telegram has already announced that it will soon be possible to import its WhatsApp conversations into the application.