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Telegram's daily growth saw an unprecedented spike during the Facebook outage.
According to an official post by Facebook, the outage that caused its services to go down was caused by a faulty configuration change internally. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were down across the world for more than 3.5 billion users. These services were down for almost 6 hours, the longest outage in the history of Facebook. The social networking site lost around USD 545,000 every hour in ad revenue, according to Standard Media Index, an ad measurement firm. Facebook's stock valuation fell by around 4.9 percent, and Mark Zuckerberg lost 6 billion USD in real-time valuation.
However, when Facebook was losing money and users, rival Telegram was seeing a massive spike in new users. According to founder Pavel Durov, the messaging client saw more than 70 million registrations during the 6 hour WhatsApp outage. He wrote in a blog post that the folks at Telegram did an exceptional job at handling the new traffic, and no one experience any issues. However, users in the Americas may have faced slower speeds as most new users were signing up from those countries.
This outage shows what can happen when a single company owns multiple important platforms. Other than causing ad revenue loss for Facebook, the outage also resulted in disruption in the trading of assets.