While Facebook’s six-hour-long outage on Monday might have hurt the company, stakeholders, and thousands of businesses that relied on its services, rival apps Telegram and Signal had a field day and took full advantage of the situation.
Private messaging app, Telegram, added over 70 million new users to the platform, according to founder Pavel Durov, who remarked the development as a record increase in Telegram’s user registration and activity. “The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day”, he stated.
The Edward Snowden-endorsed Signal, which competes with both Telegram and WhatsApp, also exceeded the norm by welcoming millions of new users
Welcome to all the newcomers! A few things to get you started on Signal: pic.twitter.com/sU8W2gMKju
— Signal (@signalapp) October 5, 2021
“The smallest of events helped trigger the largest of outcomes”, said Brian Acton, the executive chair of Signal’s holding company.
Facebook’s outage on Monday hit almost everything from trading of cryptocurrency assets to oil.
For those who do not remember, this isn’t the first time that Telegram and Signal have gained at the expense of their rival. The two added scores of users a few months ago when Facebook-owned WhatsApp was struggling to explain exactly what its new privacy policy was about.
Telegram has also added millions in the wake of numerous WhatsApp outages in the past.
