Telegram Gains 3 Million New Users During Facebook, WhatsApp Outage

Telegram seems to have had a great Wednesday on the expense of Facebook. As Facebook and its chat apps grappled with an outage spanning globally, Telegram added three million users in just 24 hours. For the UK-based chat app, which boasts of 200 million monthly active users as per the data shared in early 2018, this was a pretty significant chunk of new subscribers. While there is no way to explicitly confirm that Telegram's new users joined because of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp service disruptions, the timing cannot be a just a coincidence

Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, announced the new user numbers on his personal Telegram channel. He did not offer a reason to why the service suddenly saw this influx of new users.

“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours,” wrote Durov. “Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”

For the uninitiated, Telegram is a free encrypted messaging service, similar to WhatsApp. The app offers end-to-end encryption for voice calls and optional end-to-end encryption for “secret” chats between two users. Not all chats are encrypted end-to-end by default on Telegram, unlike WhatsApp. Telegram chat apps are available on Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows Phone, and Windows NT platforms. As per the numbers shared by the company back in March 2018, it has 200 million monthly active users.

Although Facebook's outage, which is still going on in some parts of the world, may not have helped Telegram with the new users, the disruptions in Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp service could certainly account for the users looking for a new chat app to stay connected. It is unclear if Telegram will be able to keep the new users enticed when Facebook and its chat apps are fully restored.