[ad_1]
Slowly but surely, it seems that Facebook is recovering its "family of applications" online. The consequences of the longest breakdown in the company's history remain to be demonstrated. On Thursday, one of Facebook's under-recognized competitors, Telegram, said it added three million new users in the last 24 hours. With regard to Facebook's long-term plans, this is bad news.
Earlier this morning, Pavel Durov, the eccentric founder of Telegram, posted a message on his account celebrating the flow of new users. He stated that his service offered "true confidentiality and unlimited space for all". Products from the Facebook stable, Telegram's most direct competitor is the WhatsApp private messaging service. According to the Down Detector fault detector, WhatsApp still encounters problems.
At the time of writing this article, it appears that Instagram is the only major platform belonging to Facebook that has publicly declared to be operational again. We contacted the social network to confirm that he was still working on bringing his other platforms back online for all his users. We will update this article as soon as we receive an answer.
Although WhatsApp is not particularly prevalent in the United States, it has about 1.5 billion users worldwide and is an essential part of Facebook's growth plans as it prepares to integrate all of its messaging services. Telegram has a more modest user base, with 200 million active users per month starting last March. The Durov announcement does not mean that three million people have abandoned Facebook, but do not underestimate the network effect if newcomers discover that they like Telegram and encourage their friends to join them.
Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that private messaging was the most important factor in the company's future prospects. But privacy may not be Telegram's most important competitive risk. Before blockchain projects shone in the eye of Zuckerberg, Durov enriched it thanks to crypto-currencies. Last year, his company raised $ 1.7 billion to develop a decentralized electronic payment system. The New York Times recently announced that Facebook is investing a significant amount of resources into its own blockchain-enabled payment system, which could help it reduce its reliance on advertising as its main source of revenue.
Regarding his short-term concerns, Facebook has still not publicly explained why he was hit by such a devastating outage, and it's unclear how he will handle angry advertisers. The company has reversed rumors that he was a victim of a DDoS attack.
According to research firm eMarketer, Facebook controls about 22% of the digital advertising market and generates about $ 90 million a day for advertisers. We asked Facebook how he wanted to solve his problems with angry advertisers, but we did not receive an immediate response. Bloomberg says the company has announced that it is assessing the overall impact of the problem Wednesday and that it was still open to "the possibility of refunds for advertisers".
While the New York Times reported that Facebook was under criminal investigation for actions related to sharing data with third parties, Wednesday would still be a bad day for the social network. The breakdown, associated with a possible loss of users and income, was only adding to the pain. As of Thursday morning, the only good news for Facebook is that the falling share price seems to have found a floor.
[Pavel Durov via The Verge]
[ad_2]
Source link