Telegram Founder Says Over 70 Million New Users Joined During Facebook Outage (reuters.com) 50
Messaging app Telegram gained over 70 million new users during Monday's Facebook outage, its founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday, as people worldwide were left without key messaging services for nearly six hours. Reuters reports: Facebook blamed its outage, which kept its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change. "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," Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. Durov said some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but that the service worked as usual for the majority.
Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a serious addiction if you can't go 6 hours.
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When it comes to messaging apps, it's less about addiction and more about necessity. Communicating with people at work, family and friends is a bit different that seeing your favourite instagram "star's" glam shots.
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
for 99% of the users, open the sms app and send a text instead.
makes no sense to install telegram during the outage, since you will have to ask your contact to install as well (and if you were able to get ahold of the contact during the outage, then you had another working option already)
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For at least half of the users, that's not an option because of costs. The tiny minority of people using messaging apps like whatsapp live in rich countries. Clear cut majority live in poor countries, where monetary savings are actually one of the biggest reasons they moved to said messaging services.
So how about you shove your one percenter "let those poor rural indians eat cake" shit where it belongs.
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Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... let me email my 19 year, old broke ass, Top Ramen eating self in the year 2000 and ask him what he used .... He said he use SMS and it cost $0.50 each time and he just made sure each one was important (FYI at the time Top Ramen was $0.10 each), other wise he used email. He also mentioned when he had to talk internationally, or long distance, he use some thing called Skype and had like 10 messaging apps installed with silly names like ICQ and AIM, so he could talk to friends who used different ones.
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I'm not sure if I should be flabbergasted or disgusted by the fact that you just compared a highly privileged first worlder living the life of a young student with all the perks it entails... to a typical rural indian farmer.
Either you are so utterly insulated from reality of majority of humanity that you genuinely think that former doesn't look like 1% of 1% from the perspective of the latter, or you're being extremely malicious.
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Why do you think that rural indians are so wealthy that they can afford any meaningful additional costs of basic necessities without taking a significant hit to their quality of life?
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your post makes zero sense since we are not discussing technology 20 years ago. it was about moving to a different platform that would not work if your contacts were not using it already just during an outage
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How clueless can you be ?
The reason Whatsapp is popular precisely because:
1. SMS costs. If you want to share media, MMS costs even more !
2. Free international calling. Internet connection is much much cheaper than a single international call
3. Video calling and education platforms. I know relatives in India where Whatsapp is the support platform for online education during COVID times. Schools and classrooms have Whatsapp groups. Teachers share homework assignments and talk to parents on Whatsapp. It is es
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Haven't paid extra for SMS in what feels like a decade. And anyway, don't a lot of SMSs actually transfer via Google and Apple's data networks these days?
I remember borrowing a friend's old Apple phone while I waited for my new Android phone to be delivered, and once I switched back from Apple to Android, for a week or so people couldn't message me because Apple had essentially hijacked the link, meaning that their iPhone messages were all routing via Apple's network, expecting to reach the old iPhone.
Was a
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Haven't paid extra for SMS in what feels like a decade. And anyway, don't a lot of SMSs actually transfer via Google and Apple's data networks these days?
No, that's message apps (like iMessage) that also act as SMS apps. They know if your contacts are available via the message app's servers, via SMS or both. They use the app's servers to send messages if they can, and only use SMS if they must.
I remember borrowing a friend's old Apple phone while I waited for my new Android phone to be delivered, and once I switched back from Apple to Android, for a week or so people couldn't message me because Apple had essentially hijacked the link, meaning that their iPhone messages were all routing via Apple's network, expecting to reach the old iPhone.
Was a pain in the butt to work out and fix.
Apple's iMessage is notorious for this. Once it knows a contact is available via iMessage, it refuses to use SMS for that contact every again. It is speculated that Apple does this as a from of lock-in, to keep users from switching to Android (which doesn't have iMessa
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I'm curious about this: where does SMS cost money?
In Germany it's fairly typical for SMSs to cost money to numbers outside of Germany, even to other European countries. Within Germany it's often an option when chosing cheaper or prepaid tarifs whether you want flat rate SMS or not (same with phone calls).
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woosh...
you did not understand my post. my post was about moving to a complete different IM platform being unfeasible just for an outage since you would have to get ahold your contacts one by one to get it to work.
it was not a "why use whatsapp since sms works" post
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No? Most places in the world already have region-specific second alternatives. It's Line in SouthEast Asia, Telegram in India...maybe equal parts Telegram and Signal in Europe. They are even shown in the Play Store as alternatives. The user installs it and all contacts are detected anyway.
The only reason people don't move is they have no incentive to if everything works. An outage is more than enough incentive and the barrier to move is very low. As exemplified by the news story.
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I find that doubtful given that one of the core benefits of WhatsApp is group chat - something that SMS isn't designed for and cannot do.
The more interesting/useful question is "how many of those new sign-ups continue to use Telegram 90 days later?". I suspect it won't be anywhere remotely near the 70 million who signed up.
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you should know SMS can do group SMS. i have used it, particularly when i know the group is in an area with limited signal (when mobile data will have issues compared to normal texts)
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SMS absolutely cannot do group SMS. You can check the specifications if you don't believe me.
It's highly likely you're sending group MMS, which doesn't use the SS7 protocol.
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for 99% of the users, open the sms app and send a text instead.
How is SMS an alternative to calling? And how would a phone call with international roaming charges be an alternative to something free?
Instead of making assumptions, consider asking questions instead.
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hence why i said 99 and not 100%
my post was more about switching from whatsapp to telegram just during an outage, since you would have to get ahold of the contact via other means to make it feasible.
would i do this if whatsapp was killed? sure. for an outage? no. if i had something urgent to say to someone, i would call and if this was not possible then email.
if i cannot call or email someone, i don't consider them important enough to have the urgency to move them to telegram just for an outage. makes zero
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Unironically true. A meaningful majority of messaging app users use them in large part because of cost savings.
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That's what an addict would say...
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Seek medical help. Imagining yourself to have superpower of mind reading is a sign of schizophrenia.
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Telegram is competing with Whatsap, not Facebook.
Whatsap (unlike FB/IG) is an essential service, particularly popular outside the US.
Being down for something like that is absolutely inexcusable.
That said, only a messaging service with an underlying mesh/decentralized architecture could really resist a serious technical (or policy based) outage.
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Well, actually, Telegram clearly dabbles in becoming a full "social network", with its channels feature, bots and everything.
All you need is more explanded public profiles, and maybe some media gallery stuff that channels and groups don't offer. What else does Facebook do?
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Well, didn't you read the news here a few days ago.
It was casually mentioned that Facebook employs about a 1000 people, exclusively to make their site as addictive as possible.
That people, especially in the US, are constantly telling each other that they are the only ones personally responsible for their actions, as if manipulation wasn't a thing and we wouldn't be a social species whose majority of views, knowledge and beliefs are based communication, makes it way that job way easy for them.
That's a lot of
Lotsa Botsa (Score:1)
Probably mostly bots
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That's a serious addiction if you can't go 6 hours.
Yeah I'm sure an ignorant moron may think so. In the meantime I use Facebook messenger to communicate with my aunt because its easy and convenient. As my 95 year old grandma is currently on a ventilator thanks to COVID 6 hours is effectively a lifetime when trying to communicate with someone.
Telegram worked in a pinch when we needed it.
Fuck your assumptions, and fuck you for making them.
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That's nonsense, you are not entering data into the app that makes her ventilator work better.
It's a minor inconvenience, and it sounds important enough to you that you can just use txt messages with your aunt.
You're just a dumb asshole who thinks the world revolves around your appy app. You really thought you blah-blah somehow means my assumptions were wrong? I'm a mouse and I'm stirring is not a robust argument against a general statement.
If you weren't such an asshole all the time, I'd think maybe you'
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That's nonsense, you are not entering data into the app that makes her ventilator work better.
You're the worst fucking person on Slashdot, and I'm including all the ACs in that. I would wish worse on you but having a loved one lying on their death bed while being unable to contact them would be punishing your loved one, and they are certainly a far better human than you and don't deserve it. You on the other hand do.
Learn some fucking empathy your autistic shitstain. And then go die in a fire.
It's clearly the new Facebook. Aka the new AOL. (Score:1)
That's not something to be proud of, Pavel. ^^
...and today, quieter by 70m users? (Score:2)
Was funny seeing traffic on Twitter pick up too.
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Are you providing a Matrix based solution for public use, that is free, works on mobile phones, with the scalability for upto 1 billion users? No ? I thought so.
You cannot run a service like that for free unless you have an alternative source of income (Facebook) or tons of money already stored somewhere (Telegram) . At this point, Signal is probably the closest to what you want. No need to reinvent the wheel.
In other news... (Score:3)
In other news, Facebook reportedly interested in purchasing Telegram. "We are going to make them an offer they can't refuse" said a Facebook spokesperson.
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"We are going to make them an offer they can't refuse" said a Facebook spokesperson.
Telegram's owner responds: "Dat very interesting proposition comrade. Why not come, we can drink tea and discuss with Putin."
Signal is the right one (Score:3)
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Am wondering if there was a jump in the number of people using/registering for Signal during this period.
Facebook (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:2)
why aren't more people switching to signal? (Score:1)