Cloud based Instant messaging service Telegram has claimed to have a sudden increase in signups during the period that the rival Facebook was facing an outage. Facebook in recent times has faced a lot of backlash from the users due to various reasons that included bugs and outages.
In a message that was sent to the Telegram channel founder Pavel Durov it was written, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It can be called as a coincidence that Facebook and its related family of apps had gone down for most of Wednesday as it was reported earlier. When the Instagram was being written, it was officially confirmed restored. And then unofficially, Facebook too appeared to be back online at least in Europe.
At the same time Durov does not have an explanation of the sudden spike in the sign ups but he surely taken a dig at the social networking giant Facebook, whose founder recently claimed that he now has plans to pivot the ad platform to privacy. The founder on the channel has welcomed the new 3 million users and added, “We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”When contacted Telegram, it was confirmed that the Facebook app’s downtime could be the cause of the latest sign up spike and added, “These outages always drive new users.”
At the same time they also credited growth to the mainstream overall increasing understanding about Facebook’s abusive attention harvesting practices. A year back, Telegram had announced passing 200m monthly active users. But the platform had faced restrictions and/or blocks in some of the markets that included China, Russia and Iran. It had apparently refused the government requests for encryption keys and/or user information. Durov’s home country Russia is now moving to tighten internet restrictions through new legislation. Such restrictions can increase the demand for Telegram’s encrypted messaging service as the app appears still to be partially accessible there.
Photo Credits: The Verge
