One man’s meat is another man’s poison, but if you were to translate this to the modern day context, “one web service’s outage is another service’s membership gain.”
WhatsApp, the recently acquired entity of Facebook for which the world’s largest social network paid $19 billion, endured its biggest outage to date over the weekend, and has consequently seen millions of new users signing up for rival app, Telegram, the messaging app that places plenty of emphasis on privacy as well as security.
In fact, the number of downloads of the Telegram app actually sent the app to the top 5 position in the App Store earlier today, where it also happened to be the no. 1 iPhone app across 48 different countries. Thanks to the three hour or so outage of WhatsApp, by the time it was Sunday afternoon, there were another 4.95 million that joined up with Telegram.
4 million users joined Telegram within the last 18 hours. We’re doing our best, but the service is getting unstable due to high load.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) February 23, 2014
The thing is, this huge and sudden influx of users (we are looking at 100 new users each second) has resulted in Telegram running into its own connection issues on the Old Continent, hence a 2-hour downtime. New servers were added to help alleviate the situation, but that would also have taken time.
