Telegram gains 70M new users in just one day after Facebook outage

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Messaging app Telegram gained a “record” 70 million new users on Monday, as Facebook experienced a nearly six-hour long outage across its services, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced. Encrypted messaging app Signal also reported gaining “millions” of new users on the same day. Both apps compete mainly with Facebook’s WhatsApp, although the outage also took down Facebook Messenger, and left users unable to send messages on Instagram. 70 million new users is an increase of over 10 percent compared to the 500 million monthly active users Telegram had as of January this year, the last time it reported a similar surge in new signups. Coincidentally, this last increase in users was also helped by problems at Facebook. In January, WhatsApp... Continue reading…