The Facebook outage was disturbing for some — click here to read what our team had to say about it. People were not able to communicate, businesses had been affected, it’s a lot to take. However, it turned out to be a boon for some. A new report claims that Facebook’s six-hour-long outage was beneficial for Telegram as the service added nearly 70 million users. Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, in a statement to TechCrunch, said that Telegram saw a “record increase in user registration and activity.”

“I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users,” Pavel Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. To the new 70 million Telegram users, Durov appealed to the users asking them to “stick around” and see why Telegram is “light years ahead” of the competition.

“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,” he added. Released in 2013, Telegram has roughly 500 million monthly users.

Signal, another popular end-to-end encrypted messaging service, also claimed to have added “millions” of new people to its service on Monday when Facebook went offline. Which service did you switch to when WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook went down? Let us know in the comments section below!

Via: TechCrunch