When a service typically goes down for a period, users start looking for alternatives. Same was the case with the recent WhatsApp outage which turned millions of users to alternatives such as Telegram.
WhatsApp‘s recent outage was massive and widespread, resulting in an inaccessibility of the app for many hours. Since the incident happened right after the app’s acquisition by Facebook, it has led to all sorts of conspiracy theories.
The facts, though, reveal that the outage has profited Telegram immensely. Telegram is another messaging app which tries to differentiate itself from the crowd by citing privacy and security as its key focuses. As soon as WhatsApp went down, users started downloading Telegram.
And this soon snowballed into millions of downloads. Telegram shot to the top of iPhone app charts across 48 countries, becoming the most quickly downloaded app. It also garnered a slot in the top 5 positions at the App Store. Recent estimates reveal that nearly 5 million people have joined Telegram in the last two days or so. And WhatsApp’s outage has been a key trigger for this.
Interestingly, the Telegram team wasn’t ready to entertain such a sudden interest of the users in their service. So when they started getting 100 new users every second, things got a little out of hands. The servers were overloaded and the service went down for two hours.
It is intriguing that the arena of messaging apps is suddenly heating up even when the likes of WhatsApp and Viber have been around for a long time. Perhaps the recent spotlight shed on WhatsApp due to its acquisition by Facebook has piqued up the interest of users in these apps.
You can download Telegram for iOS and Android here.
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