Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were hit hard earlier this month when all three services crashed for hours. The access interruption was reportedly caused by an internal error rather than a malicious third-party attack. But in any case, millions of users could not access social media platforms. The outage is estimated to have cost Facebook $65 million (via Forbes), but the story doesn’t end there.
During the outage, millions of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users flocked to alternative social media platforms to connect with their friends, followers and customers. As millions began searching for other social apps, many took to Twitter. Telegram, on the other hand, gained about 70 million new users thanks to Facebook’s problems. The platform has continued to grow since the end of last week and the messaging app has reached another milestone. Telegram has surpassed 1 billion Google Play Store downloads.
The failure of one company can turn into the success of another, and Telegram is definitely on the winning side here. The app’s download counter on Google Play Store was 500,000,000 downloads not too long ago, but now this counter exceeds 1,000,000,000 downloads.
Let us remind you that Telegram is also available as an APK from its official website and these downloads are not included in the Play Store download count. On the other hand, 1 billion downloads does not necessarily mean that there are more than 1 billion people using Telegram. Regardless, though, the app’s popularity is definitely growing. . .
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