Telegram gains 70mn new users after Facebook and subsidiaries suffer global outage

Telegram gained a staggering 70 million users after global giant Facebook and its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram suffered a massive global outage on Monday evening, October 4. The outage, which lasted more than six hours, was due to a faulty configuration change as confirmed by Facebook in a statement.

As a result, over 3.5 billion users worldwide were affected. With Facebook suffering massive losses, rival firms like Telegram enjoyed a field day.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov reveals firm gained over 70 million users

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov revealed on Tuesday, October 5, that the messaging app added 70 million users when Facebook suffered a power outage. While writing on his Telegram channel, Pavel wrote, "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."

Moreover, Telegram recently gained more than a billion downloads after WhatsApp's new privacy policy faced serious scrutiny. It is believed that several people moved to rival firms like Telegram and Signal because they deemed them to be safer options than WhatsApp.

Facebook explained reason for power outage

Facebook released a statement on its website to explain the reason for the power outage. "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt," read the statement.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for inconvenience

After Facebook and its subsidiaries suffered a power outage for six hours on Monday, October 4, the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, took to his Facebook handle and apologized to his customers for any inconvenience that was caused. Zuckerberg's Facebook post read, "Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."