Facebook recently went through an outage affecting almost all of its products, with users reporting everything from total lack of access to the inability to access features on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. While the company has managed to finally get things under control after more than 24 hours, its downtime was quite the blessing in disguise to Telegram, which serves as a rival to both Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp services.

Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov recently shared the news on his Telegram channel, claiming the WhatsApp alternative bagged three million new users in the last 24 hours alone. That's quite a drop in the bucket compared to Telegram's total user count of 200 million. Ironically, it also serves as just another reminder of just how indispensable Facebook has become in day-to-day digital communication. A mere 24-hour outage of the company's products can yield an enormous uptick in traffic for its rivals as users seek alternative means of communication.

Durov also boasted about Telegram's privacy and unlimited storage, something that is often touted by Messenger and WhatsApp naysayers in favour of alternatives like Telegram and Signal. While WhatsApp has had end-to-end encrytion since 2014, Facebook Messenger still does not have encryption by default, though that is said to be changing soon.

Posted: Mar 17, 2019 11:32 am
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Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/facebooks-outage-is-telegrams-gain-as-the-chat-service-gains-3-million-new-users