Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday that the messaging app gained more than 70 million new users during Monday’s Facebook outage, as people around the world were left without critical messaging services for nearly six hours.
“Telegram’s daily growth rate exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.
Durov said some users in the US may have experienced slow speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but the service worked as usual for most.
Facebook blamed its outage, which prevented its 3.5 billion users from accessing services like WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change.
EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said the outage demonstrated the repercussions of relying on some of the big players and underscored the need for more rivals.
Russia said the incident showed Moscow was right to develop its own sovereign Internet platform and social network.
WhatsApp’s nearly six-hour-long outage affected trading of Russian oil assets from cryptocurrencies on Monday, market players said, although a quick shift to alternative platforms such as Telegram limits serious disruption.
‘No malicious activity’
Facebook has said there was “no malicious activity behind” a faulty configuration change that shut down all of its services from the Internet for nearly six hours the previous day.
The company had not previously clarified whether the configuration change was planned or that someone intentionally interfered with its servers.
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