When Facebook users had finishedmocking the companyover itscalamitous global outage on Monday, October 4, many apparently flocked to rival apps in order to get back in touch with friends and family.
The six-hour outage — caused byconfiguration changes to Facebook’s routersthat prevented its computer systems from communicating in the usual way — also impacted Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which Facebook also operates.
With billions of people affected, tens of millions of users made a beeline for rival messaging app Telegram, according to Pavel Durov, the startup’s CEO and founder.
“Yesterday Telegram experienced a record increase in user registration and activity,” Pavel wrote inan online post, claiming that a staggering 70 million people signed up in a matter of hours.
Telegram launched in 2013 and as of July this year served 550 million monthly active users.
Signal, another messaging app that’s estimated to have around 40 million monthly active users, also claimed to have added“millions” of new usersto its service on Monday while Facebook remained offline.
Whether those new sign-ups convert into regular users of Telegram and Signal remains to be seen, but the apparent desertion by so many people in response to a single event will doubtless concern Facebook’s top team.
As the outage continued on Monday, Facebook’s market value fell by nearly $50 billion, though it recovered some of those losses on Tuesday. It’s also thought to havelost around $79 million in ad revenueduring the downtime. Once Facebook and its other services were restored later on Monday, the company said it was “working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
If the Facebook fiasco has left you keen to try a new messaging app, then take a moment tocheck out Digital Trends’ top suggestions.
