Instant messaging app Telegram has gained 70 million users following the outages experienced by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, making a record 10% gain in users in just one day.
The outage across Facebook’s various platforms occurred earlier on Monday and lasted roughly six hours, making it the biggest global outage for the company since 2008. While both competitors Telegram and Signal gained a significant amount of users as a result of the breakdown, Facebook itself also lost out greatly, with many investors selling off the company’s shares which ultimately resulted in CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing $6 billion USD. Facebook has since explained that the outage was caused by configuration changes on its side and shut down any suggestion of data breaches and leaks.
While Facebook’s services have since come back online, whistleblower Edward Snowden continued to encourage users to swap over to non-profit alternatives such as Signal, which he claims he uses daily. “Facebook-owned Whatsapp being down is a reminder that you and your friends should probably be using a more private, non-profit alternative like @Signalapp anyway,” he wrote. “It’s just as free, and takes like 30 seconds to switch.”
With Telegram and Signal seeing a massive influx of users during the period, its services were also slightly affected, though not to the extent that Facebook suffered from. Telegram users within the Americas experienced slower speeds than usual while some Signal users weren’t able to see all of their contacts. Despite this, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov nonetheless took a dig at Facebook while reassuring its users, posting: “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.”
Elsewhere in tech, Twitch confirmed a massive data breach.
