Wednesday, October 06, 2021
On the day of the Facebook failure
Telegram posted record growth
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While Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are unavailable for hours on Monday, the hour of competition strikes. When looking for an alternative messenger, tens of millions of people land on Telegram.
The messenger service Telegram recorded a record increase in users in the wake of the gigantic Facebook breakdown on Monday. The service registered 70 million new registrations within one day, wrote its founder Pawel Durow on Tuesday in his Telegram channel.
“We have welcomed more than 70 million users from other platforms,” said Durow. “I want to say to the new users: Welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messenger service,” added Durow. “We won’t let you down if others do.”
Facebook and the Instagram and Whatsapp services, which are also part of the group, were down for around seven hours on Monday. Facebook blamed a faulty reconfiguration of routers for the total failure of the platforms and apologized to the users. The incident, which potentially affected billions of users, also made clear the great dependence of many people and advertising companies on the services.
“You can’t just rely on a few great players,” wrote the EU Commissioner for Competition and Digital, Margrethe Vestager, on Twitter. In particular, there are various alternatives to the Whatsapp messenger, which Facebook took over in 2014, such as Signal, Threema and Telegram. A specific feature of the service is that up to 200,000 users can be reached simultaneously via closed groups. That makes it interesting for opposition movements, but also for conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists.
Telegram was founded in 2013 by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. The brothers had previously developed the Russian online service Vkontakte, which is similar to Facebook. In January, Pawel Durow had given the number of monthly active Telegram users at 500 million. The last time it was popular at the beginning of the year was after Whatsapp announced that it would change its terms of use.
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