Over 70 million new users joined Telegram during Facebook outage, announces founder

Telegram's creator, Pavel Durov, claimed on Tuesday that the messaging app attracted over 70 million new users during Monday's Facebook outage, which left people across the world without vital communications services for over six hours. Facebook blamed the outage, which prevented its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, on an error in setup. "Telegram's daily growth pace surpassed the usual by orders of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in a single day," Durov said on his Telegram channel.

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According to Durov, some customers in the Americas may have encountered slower speeds as millions hurried to join up at the same moment. Still, the service functioned usually for the vast majority. According to market participants, WhatsApp's almost six-hour outage on Monday disrupted the trade of assets ranging from cryptocurrency to Russian oil. However, a swift switch to other platforms such as Telegram minimised severe damage.

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