Telegram gained 70 million new users after WhatsApp, Facebook went down

Users all over the world were recently unable to access Facebook and its other services, such as WhatsApp and Instagram. The outage lasted more than 6 hours and cost Facebook millions of dollars in lost revenue. During the outage, however, the grass was greener for WhatsApp competitor Telegram, which gained millions of new followers. During the outage, the messaging service saw a massive increase in new registrations as many users switched from WhatsApp to Telegram. During Facebook’s downtime, the platform gained more than 70 million new users.

When Facebook loses, Telegram gains

According to a Facebook official post, the outage that caused its services to go down was caused by an internal configuration change that went wrong. Over 3.5 billion people around the world were unable to access Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. These services were unavailable for nearly 6 hours, the longest outage in Facebook’s history. According to Standard Media Index, an ad measurement firm, the social networking site lost around USD 545,000 in ad revenue every hour. Facebook’s stock price dropped by 4.9 percent, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by $6 billion in real-time.

When Facebook was losing money and users, however, rival Telegram saw a massive increase in new users. During the 6 hour outage, the messaging app saw more than 70 million registrations, according to founder Pavel Durov. In a blog post, he stated that the Telegram team did an excellent job of handling the increased traffic and that no one had any problems. Users in the Americas, on the other hand, may have experienced slower speeds because those countries were the source of the majority of new users.

This outage demonstrates the dangers of owning multiple important platforms by a single company. The outage not only cost Facebook money in ad revenue but also caused a halt in asset trading.