Telegram says gained over 70 million new users during Facebook outage

Downdetector, a site that monitors reports of outages across the internet, said the Facebook service outage is the largest it has ever seen. According to The Wall Street Journal, the outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook’s internal communication tools.

The massive outage of Facebook-owned platforms like WhatApp, Instagram, messenger and the parent website, proved to be beneficial for rival channels. Telegram, which also offers WhatsApp like instant messaging service, said on Tuesday that it gained more than 70 million new users during Monday's Facebook outage.

The Telegram application on a smartphone arranged in the Brooklyn Borough of New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. Signal and Telegram, two private messenger apps, saw downloads and user sign-ups soar during the extended downtime of Facebook Inc.�s network of apps and services. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)

"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," Telegram founder Pavel Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.

Users were unable to access the messaging services of Facebook for six hours. Facebook blamed its outage, which impacted 3.5 billion users, to a faulty configuration change. The company added that it had "no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."

"We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient," Facebook Vice President Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a statement on Monday.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the outage also caused widespread disruptions to Facebook’s internal communication tools, including some voice calls and work apps used for calendar appointments and other functions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Telegram had earlier said on Twitter that users of its messenger in some regions, amid large-scale outages on Facebook, may experience problems loading chats and receiving notifications, but the service will work for the majority of the users.

Downdetector, a site that monitors reports of outages across the internet, said the Facebook service outage is the largest it has ever seen.

The US-led the world in the number of reports for disrupted service of more than 1.7 million, followed by Germany at 1.3 million reports and the Netherlands at 9,15,000 reports.