Telegram, the cloud-based messaging app, just reached a billion total downloads on Android. This was achieved partly due to the mass migration of users from Facebook and WhatsApp during their recent outage. Unfortunately, there is no current data on the total number of Telegram downloads on all platforms.
For reference, WhatsApp currently has a total of more than two billion users, but that’s across all platforms. Telegram reached their milestone on Android alone, which is an impressive feat, especially since Telegram is a standalone company not supported by huge companies like Facebook.
The Facebook outage that caused the migration
Earlier this month, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger all went down. The outage lasted about six hours and the second outage lasted two hours.
Many users of WhatsApp and Messenger were understandably alarmed and quickly searched for a substitute to send their messages.
According to Telegram founder Pavel Dourov, the outage caused Telegram to gain more than 70 million new users in just 24 hours. “The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” he said regarding the surge of new users.
It was a record increase in user registration and activity for Telegram, which led to even more growth after the outage.
Telegram actually reached one billion downloads across all platforms back in August 2021. It is possible that this milestone was aided by WhatsApp’s European consumer law scandal, which might have drove users to use Telegram instead. It is important to note that the number of downloads does not correlate with the number of active users. For example, Telegram only had 550 million active monthly users in July of this year.
Even though Facebook seems to have had a bad year, with their Amazon rainforest scandal to their terrible response to the whistleblower, they still boast a ridiculous 2.9 billion monthly active users in Q2 2021.
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