The private messaging service’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov revealed that Telegram gained 3 million new followers in the last 24 hours—a massive gain in users in such a short period of time, considering the messaging app only has around 200 million users worldwide.
Yes, 200 million is a lot, but not compared to the numbers of users of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. So why did Telegram pick up so many users in the last 24 hours? Though Durov didn’t explicitly state it, it’s easy to infer that his mention of “the last 24 hours” was a reference to all the trouble Facebook has had during that time period. Within the last day, Facebook has been plagued by outages of its most popular services, including Telegram competitors Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
And now we know that apparently 3 million people were so annoyed at those outages that they were willing to jump to a new messaging app during Facebook’s downtime.
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