[ad_1]
The Telegram messaging app recorded a “record” of 70 million new users on Monday, as Facebook experienced a nearly six-hour outage on its services, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said. The Signal encrypted messaging app also reported winning “millions”New users the same day. The two apps mainly compete with Facebook’s WhatsApp, although the outage also removed Facebook Messenger and prevented users from sending messages to Instagram.
70 million new users, an increase of over 10% from the 500 million monthly active users Telegram had in january of this year, the last time it reported a similar increase in new listings. Coincidentally, this latest increase in user numbers was also helped by problems at Facebook. In January, WhatsApp mismanaged the introduction of a new privacy policy, raising concerns that it was sharing private user data with parent company Facebook.
Although Durov claimed that Telegram “continues to perform flawlessly” in the face of its “unprecedented growth,” he admitted that “some users in the Americas may have experienced slower than usual speed while millions of users from these continents rushed to register with Telegram. all at once. ”Signal users were also having issues where they couldn’t see all of their contacts.
“For new users, I’d like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the world’s largest independent messaging platform,” Durov wrote. “We won’t let you down when others do.” Telegram has long wooed WhatsApp’s 2 billion users, and earlier this year it added the ability to import WhatsApp chat histories in a move designed to help users exit the Facebook-owned messaging service. During this year, it also added other features focused on video calling and live streaming, although it still doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default unlike Signal and WhatsApp.
“The Facebook-owned Whatsapp outage is a reminder that you and your friends should probably be using a more private, non-profit alternative like @Signalapp anyway,” whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote during the outage, “It’s just as free and takes like 30 seconds to change. Snowden has long been a supporter of Signal, and said in 2015 that he used it every day.
[ad_2]
Source link