According to Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, 70 million users have started using Telegram during the Facebook outage.
Telegram gains 70 million new users during the Facebook incident
Facebook blamed a faulty configuration change for the outage, which prevented its 3.5 billion users from using WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Durov said: “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.”
Some users may have experienced slower speeds because millions have tried to sign up for Telegram. However, Durov confirmed that the service was working as usual for most users.
The EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said the outage proved the dangers of depending on a few major companies and underscored the importance of having more competitors.
Russia also commented on the Facebook outage, the country officials said they were once again right to develop their own social platforms.
WhatsApp’s six-hour outage disrupted trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to Russian oil, although a quick transition to alternative platforms such as Telegram prevented significant damage.
