Telegram Gains 3 Million Users While Facebook And Its Services Went Down

Facebook and three of its main services – Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – experienced significant outages worldwide, which forced the company to deny cyber attack. The disruption in Facebook’s services have turned out to be a boon for Telegram. According to Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, the messaging platform gained three million new users during the outage that affected Facebook services around the world. The addition of new users were announced by Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov on his personal Telegram channel. As of March 2018, Telegram reportedly has over 200 million active users and the new announcement is a big number for the platform.

In his Telegram Channel post, Pavel wrote, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours. Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.” Telegram is an encrypted messaging service similar to WhatsApp and it is free to use. The service runs on user donations rather than a targeted ads model used by companies such as Facebook. While Facebook collects user data to target ads at them, Telegram does not follow any such practice.

The platform has always emphasized that it protects user privacy and has fiercely competed with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which have over billion monthly active users. One of the key features of Telegram is its end-to-end encryption, which the service gained way back in 2013. Telegram added end-to-end encryption to its system three years before WhatsApp. The saga shows that Facebook’s loss is Telegram’s gain, which has become the central element of the social media industry where Facebook remains the juggernaut and others vying for smaller market share.―BGR