Telegram Gains 70M Use In A Day After WhatsApp Outage: The outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have negatively affected the company and its shareholders but it gave a very good opportunity to rival messaging apps. Telegram reaped the most benefit out of the situation. After the outage, Telegram managed to add 70 million users just in one day.
Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and chief executive while commenting on its massive popularity said that it was a record increase in user registration and activity. The rush of so many users simultaneously in a platform caused a slower speed for many. A similar issue was seen in Signal too where users were not able to see their contact.
Recently, Telegram managed to have one billion downloads and in 2021, it is flaunting monthly active users of 500 million. In addition to Telegram, even Signal added many new years. According to reports, Signal added a million users too. Coincidentally, both WhatsApp and Signal saw a similar surge when WhatsApp was struggling with its privacy policy.
When people fail to upload their Cool Photos as WhatsApp and Instagram as statuses and Sexy Photos as their display picture, switching the messaging apps makes sense to the users. This very fact contributed to increasing the number of users of WhatsApp and Instagram rivals. After the WhatsApp outage, Telegram topped the U.S. iPhone download chart according to a report by Sensor Tower.
How Is Telegram Improving Itself?
Telegram is known to be the largest independent messaging platform. While talking about Telegram, Durov commented that even though others will fail you, Telegram won’t. For making it easier for the users to conveniently switch from WhatsApp to Telegram, it added a feature that allows the users to import WhatsApp chat histories. In addition to that, it further improved its video calling and live streaming. Telegram was very happy with the way it handled the unexpected surge of users.
Why Is Signal Loved?
Signal just like WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption by default. During the WhatsApp outage this year, Edward Snowden tweeted that the app is free and it hardly takes 30 seconds to switch from WhatsApp to Signal. Also, it is a non-profitable app.
How WhatsApp Affected Other Businesses?
Even though WhatsApp had a positive impact on Signal and Telegram, it negatively affected other businesses. It negatively impacted many small businesses, especially the ones that had their presence only on Instagram and Facebook. After the outage, many small business owners learned the lesson that it is not wise to have all their presence only on social media platforms. Many business owners will start working on creating their own website to avoid this dependence on social media platforms. Further, the outage reduced the share value of Facebook by 5.4. Trading from across the globe suffered because of the outage as many clients prefer communicating over WhatsApp for their trading.
People of Nigeria were especially affected by the outage of these social media platforms. As Twitter is banned in Nigeria, many people became highly dependent on platforms by Facebook. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the country with more than 90 million users. In addition to that 86.2% use, Facebook and 67.2% are active on Facebook Messenger. The six-hour outage created a massive communication gap amongst the Nigerians where both the personal and professional life of the people were hampered.
What To Learn From The Outage?
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by a single company and the glitch in the giant network made it extremely difficult to swiftly fix the problem. Coincidentally, all of these platforms are quite popular and when marking an existence in social media platforms, often these three are considered. However, when all three of these platforms stopped working simultaneously, many audiences understood that it is not at all wise to put all the apps and services in one network and one should ensure that their presence is in diverse platforms owned by different people.
Many third-party apps and websites also faced a temporary outage because they only provided the “Login with Facebook” sign-in option. With the Facebook outage, people were not able to enter other apps too. Therefore, it is important for business owners to provide the customers with multiple log-in options to ensure that they do not suffer because of an outage of a single platform.
