While Mark Zuckerberg deals with the aftermath of The Great Facebook Outage Of 2021, another CEO, Pavel Durov, is revelling in the number of users that flocked to his app in the last 24 hours. The CEO of Telegram welcomed these ‘refugees’ with open arms.
On Tuesday, Telegram picked up a staggering 70 million users. All of them, no doubt, a result of not being able to access Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp.
“The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” Durov wrote.
While Durav said Telegram handled the load, there was a bit of a lag, given the addition of literally millions of people.
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“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,” he explained.
While Durov skipped throwing shade (a wasted opportunity, really), he did fire one shot.
“For the new users I’d like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messaging platform. We won’t fail you when others will.”
Prior to the boost, Telegram had around 500 million users.
In case you somehow missed it, Facebook and all of its affiliated companies and services suddenly disappeared from the web on Tuesday — an outage that lasted over five hours and left users unable to reach their FB, WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram accounts. Rumours and conspiracy theories soon spread that the social media giant had been hacked, or that it was trying to distract from its imminent congressional woes.
But alas, the whole global blackout was started by a ‘faulty configuration change’ issued in the course of routine maintenance. That misconfiguration accidentally shut down Facebook’s backbone, the globally distributed network of fibre optic cables responsible for connecting all of the company’s data centres throughout the world.