Last Monday, millions of people were left without communication after a worldwide outage of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram was reported. This unusual event led internet users to seek other platforms to contact their friends or family, making Telegram one of the big winners of the social media outage.
Pavel Durov, founder of the instant messaging service, confirmed this news by stating that his app registered more than 70 million new users during the global blackout of Facebook apps.
"I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth, as Telegram continued to function smoothly for the vast majority of our users (...) millions of people rushed to register on Telegram right away," he said.
Likewise, the Russian entrepreneur emphasized that, although the Telegram platform was overwhelmed at some point due to the record increase in users, the application is a more than reliable option for anyone who wishes to download it.
WhatsApp outage: apps that reported failures
It is worth mentioning that the apps controlled by Mark Zuckerberg's company were not the only ones that failed during the so-called "Black Monday," as problems were also reported in services like TikTok, Twitter, Gmail, Youtube, Tinder, Netflix, Snapchat, Viber, and Amazon.
How long did WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook go down?
The popular social media platforms were down for more than six hours worldwide. The issues with the apps began around 10:39 a.m. (Peruvian time) and they started to gradually function again around 4:30 p.m. approximately.