Why is Telegram the big winner of the Facebook outage?

Monday the whole world was paralyzed, the networks social and other instant messaging applications of the Facebook group were the victims of a bug, making them inaccessible for several hours. So billions of people around the world have had to find a solution, all more or less at the same time. While many have taken refuge on Twitter, which has experienced a peak in activity , others, impatient during the few hours of cutoff, have created new accounts on third-party messaging apps, like Telegram.

Russian app, known for its sense of privacy , recorded 70 million new users on Monday night alone. The co-founder and general manager of the application, Pavel Durov, was moreover delighted the day after this turn of events. “I am proud of the way our team has handled this unprecedented growth, as Telegram has continued to function perfectly for the vast majority of our users” , he wrote on his Telegram channel.

But despite this successful evening, the CEO of the application himself recognized that some users, especially in South America, may have had connection problems due to this sudden server overload. Very popular on the South American continent, the WhatsApp application, blocked by the outage, was immediately replaced by Telegram to continue to maintain the discussion groups. On Telegram’s side, this boost is seen with great enthusiasm. The challenge now is to succeed in retaining this audience in order to sustain the arrival of these millions of users. Today the Russian app, which recently passed 1 billion downloads, has more than 500 million active users.

Signal: the other winner of the day

On the Signal side, the third most famous messaging application behind WhatsApp and Telegram , the firm is also delighted to have seen the arrival “Millions of new users” . In a Twitter post, Signal also wished the engineers and developers of the Facebook group good luck as they attempted to fix the outage during the evening.

Welcome to all the newcomers! A few things to get you started on Signal: pic.twitter.com/sU8W2gMKju

– Signal (@signalapp) October 5, 2021

Signal and Telegram had already been in the spotlight earlier this year, when WhatsApp planned to merge its personal database with that of Facebook in order to be able to resell this information to data banks or salespeople. This new policy, completely contrary to the original values ​​of WhatsApp had been very badly received, leading millions of users to leave the application of the Facebook group for Signal and Telegram.