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.
This has brought out a lot of benefits to telegram as between the outage which
happened with Facebook and Whatsapp. People gained their interest in
telegram and liked the app and this took a step up for Telegram because earlier
there were very few users and they were not having this much of market position as
well. So, the outage of the two parties brought home some profit for the third party.
