Telegram says it added 70M users on Monday amid the outage of Facebook's products; Telegram recently reported passing 1B total downloads and 500M MAUs

Manish Singh / TechCrunch : Source: Durov's Channel .

TechCrunch 2021-10-06 Manish Singh

Context & Ripple Effects

Telegram had already shown that Facebook service disruptions can drive abrupt switching: Durov said a prior outage coincided with 3 million sign-ups in 24 hours. Its distribution base had also widened sharply, with 1 billion global downloads reported ahead of this incident.

The new surge lands as Telegram reports 500 million monthly active users and has outlined an advertising platform for public one-to-many channels. That makes outage-driven acquisition relevant not just to reach, but to the scale of its planned business model.

First-order effects

Telegram receives a large, immediate influx of users while Facebook's products are unavailable, expanding the audience it can try to retain after service is restored.
Facebook's outage temporarily shifts messaging and audience attention to Telegram, reinforcing Telegram's position as an available alternative for users seeking continuity.

Second-order effects

Telegram's planned public-channel ad platform gains a larger potential audience, increasing the commercial importance of converting outage arrivals into sustained activity.
Facebook faces a stronger incentive to limit service disruptions because repeated outages give rival messaging services a low-friction acquisition event, as the earlier Telegram spike indicates.

Third-order effects

If outage-driven switching becomes recurrent, service reliability becomes a more visible competitive dimension in messaging, alongside features and network effects.
Large messaging platforms may increasingly treat sudden cross-platform user inflows as a distribution channel, favoring services that can absorb demand and monetize broad channel audiences.

The trend: Messaging competition is becoming more sensitive to platform reliability, as outages create rapid openings for users to try established alternatives.

Discussion

@itz_df @itz_df on x
People returning to Facebook and WhatsApp after 6hrs on Twitter and Telegram #facebookdown https://twitter.com/...
@artman Tuomas Artman on x
Growth strategy: Wait for WhatsApp to have a major outage: https://www.reuters.com/...
@jeffnolan Jeff Nolan on x
“Individual data centers were reporting dips in power usage in the range of tens of megawatts” be interesting to see the effect of this outage on the electricity grid for the time it was down https://twitter.com/...
@fb_engineering @fb_engineering on x
Now that our services are fully restored, we are sharing more details about yesterday's outage. https://engineering.fb.com/...
@schrep Mike Schroepfer on x
Yesterday's outage across our products was a bad one, so we're sharing some more detail here on exactly what happened, how it happened, and what we're learning from it: https://engineering.fb.com/...
@ketanj0 Ketan Joshi on x
Facebook's data centres specifically had a serious power demand / supply issue. Their load is so high that suddenly re-activating their service could have caused grid instability: https://engineering.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@jeffsussna Jeff Sussna on x
On today's episode of Cascading Failures - “Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool didn't properly stop the command” https://twitter.com/...
@mattblaze Matt Blaze on x
This time, it's DNS *and* BGP. https://twitter.com/...
@daveaglick Dave Glick on x
Didn't think we'd hear much of anything so pleasantly surprised - a very nice debrief in just the right amount of detail. Some interesting things to ponder on the nature of very large global services, security vs. maintainability, etc. https://twitter.com/...
@dcuthbert Daniel Cuthbert on x
Kudos for being so open to what happened. Others could learn from this https://twitter.com/...
@newstalkfm @newstalkfm on x
Facebook says the outage was due to a ‘faulty configuration change’ and has apologised to its 3.5 billion users. https://www.newstalk.com/...
@ggjono Jonathan Steward on x
I could completely understand shutting an interface or two on a few devices, but I'm pretty sure if an engineer was to type out all of Facebooks device and interface parings they would be there a long time.
@sherifkozman KoZman on x
If we accept this explanation at face value it means that there is a serious flaw in a critical system (tool) that has been overlooked which shouldn't be the case in such a global scale platform nor in engineering culture supposedly mature. https://twitter.com/...
@loic_na Loic Nasello on x
Very interesting read, there's much to learn. Even when you're prepared to everything that could come in (very smart people's) mind, this kind of outage can happen. It reminds me plane and nuclear industries, very mature ones today. Datacenter industry is still learning https://t…
@signalapp @signalapp on x
Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it's like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays
@radiohana Hana Baba on x
Context for US folx- WhatsApp being down means total disconnect for many in the global south- it's not just for calling and texting, but sending & receiving money too. #WhatsAppDown
@aurabogado Aura Bogado on x
The repercussions of WhatsApp being down in The Rest Of The World are vast and devastating. It's like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. The app essentially functions as an unregulated utility.
@telliotter Tori Elliott on x
When FB's services went down it was more than inconvenient for people living outside the US/Europe—in many places where FB's products are the internet, life ground to a halt. @restofworld https://restofworld.org/...
@saiduttj Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr on x
Facts. Isn't this the biggest case for actually enforcing antitrust laws? https://twitter.com/...
@anotherazntart Just on x
It really is scary that WhatsApp has a monopoly on communication in large parts of the world. https://twitter.com/...

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