It was a known fact that Telegram gained users during Facebook’s recent outage, but founder Pavel Durov is putting a number on it: 70 million.
Facebook experienced one of the worst outages in its history on Monday, impacting all of its services, including Messenger and WhatsApp. Users flocked to Signal and Telegram to stay in contact with their loved ones, friends and business associates, causing both services to struggle with the increased load.
Durov has quantified exactly how many new users flocked to Telegram, to the tune of 70 million, according to his Telegram channel.
Yesterday Telegram experienced a record increase in user registration and activity.
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. I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time.
I ask our existing users to say hi to their newly arrived friends, help them unpack, and let them know what we have in stock. Make sure they stick around and see why Telegram is light years ahead of the competition.
For the new users I’d like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messaging platform. We won’t fail you when others will.