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Social media giant Facebook was down for almost 20 hours in some countries. Even Instagram and WhatsApp faced server issues due to which users across the world could not post or share media content. This outage, however, turned out to be a boon for Telegram, a UK-based messaging application.
Uptil 2018, Telegram had an active user base of 200 million monthly active users. After Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp services went down, over 3 million people switched to Telegram in less than 24 hours.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours. Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.” He made the announcement on his personal Telegram channel. Durov did not reveal the reason behind a sudden surge in the user base, but it is said to be due to Facebook family apps going down on Wednesday night.
Although Telegram offers the same services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, its business model to generate revenue is quite different. The encrypted messaging app does not have ads and runs on user donations. Facebook apps, on the other hand, collect user data which are used to target ads.
Telegram has always stated that the app never compromises on user privacy. The app has been competing with WhatsApp and Messenger, which have over five times more monthly active users compared to the UK-based messaging app.
Telegram provides features like sharing unlimited file-size, end-to-end encryption, secret chats, chatbots, night mode, etc. Telegram introduced end-to-end encryption in 2013, three years before WhatsApp. It even has dark mode which WhatsApp is said to be releasing soon in its upcoming updates.
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