70 Million “Refugees” Join Telegram During WhatsApp Outage

Telegram is already considered one of the top alternatives to WhatsApp, so the outage encountered by Facebook and all of its other platforms, including Instagram and Messenger, on Monday has pushed an impressive number of users to competing products. According to Telegram founder Pavel Durov, no less than 70 million people joined the service in just a single day. While Durov doesn’t specifically mention WhatsApp, it’s pretty clear most users come from the Facebook-owned platform, especially given the many hours of outage experienced this week. “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 ...