What became a disaster for Facebook when its applications, including WhatsApp and Instagram, went down, it became a boon for Telegram. While Telegram is not as big as WhatsApp, there’s no other app that can give competition to WhatsApp the way Telegram does. One of the many reasons why WhatsApp wins is because of clean experience and early mover advantage. But Telegram has already achieved the milestone of a billion downloads, so clearly, it is not a small application.
According to a Reuters report, the outage of WhatsApp that came on Monday resulted in a positive thing for rival Telegram. Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, on Tuesday, said that Telegram added over 70 million new users after WhatsApp went down.
Daily Growth Rate of Telegram Increased By Huge Magnitude
Telegram’s daily growth rate increased by a huge magnitude as WhatsApp went down. Adding over 70 million users in a day is no joke. Clearly, people who wanted to text others saw Telegram as the next best option.
But this won’t happen again and again for Telegram. WhatsApp is back up now, and it will take yet another outage of the application for Telegram to see this many users coming to its platform in a single day.
In fact, as per Durov, so many people were trying to download Telegram in America at the same time that they must have experienced slow speeds. WhatsApp going down was a big thing. It didn’t just stop people from communicating with their loved ones, but it also affected other sectors of the economy. People couldn’t trade stocks and cryptocurrencies anymore. While there were other platforms available, because WhatsApp is the predominantly used application around the globe, it resulted in a big problem for everyone. Thus, it might be handy to keep another social media platform handy on your smartphones, such as Telegram or Signal, just in case there’s another such outage of WhatsApp.