Facebook and its other services such as WhatsApp and Instagram were recently down for users across the globe. The outage lasted for more than 6 hours and caused millions of dollars in damage to Facebook. However, the grass was greener for WhatsApp competitor Telegram, who gained millions of new followers during the outage. The messaging service registered a massive spike in new registrations during the outage as a lot of users moved from WhatsApp to Telegram. The platform gained more than 70 million new users during Facebook’s downtime.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov reviled that the messaging app added 70 million users when Facebook and WhatsApp went down. “I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” Drove wrote on its Telegram channel.
Telegram recently garnered more than 1billion downloads and had 500 million active users. Not only Telegram but Signal also witnessed an onslaught of users when WhatsApp became non-functional for hours. The messaging apps saw an uptick in users when WhatsApp’s new privacy policy were under constant scrutiny.
Users were unable to access the messaging services of Facebook for six hours. Facebook blamed its outage, which impacted 3.5 billion users, to a faulty configuration change. The company added that it had “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
About the outage, Facebook said, “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” The social media company also noted that it has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
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