Telegram founder reveals impressive adoption figures

Oct 6, 2021 09:03 GMT  ·  By

Telegram is already considered one of the top alternatives to WhatsApp, so the outage encountered by Facebook and all of its other platforms, including Instagram and Messenger, on Monday has pushed an impressive number of users to competing products.

According to Telegram founder Pavel Durov, no less than 70 million people joined the service in just a single day.

While Durov doesn’t specifically mention WhatsApp, it’s pretty clear most users come from the Facebook-owned platform, especially given the many hours of outage experienced this week.

“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. I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” Durov said.

The transition from WhatsApp to Telegram

The en-masse migration from WhatsApp to Telegram actually started earlier this year when the Facebook-owned company introduced a series of highly controversial privacy changes that convinced many users it was time to look for an alternative.

Services like Telegram and Signal therefore recorded a massive booth in the number of new user registrations, with Durov himself confirming the trends and promising a full focus on user privacy.

The bigger question, however, is how many of the users who made the switch to Telegram won’t end up going back to WhatsApp. Many could keep Telegram on their devices as a backup messenger, but WhatsApp could continue to serve as the daily driver unless something once again goes wrong and convinces everybody to make the full switch to an alternative.