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Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
- i_like_apis 5y agoEven luckier, their system handled the load apparently. Hopefully their eng team is proud of it.
- TallonRain 5y agoNot really, plenty of users were unable to connect for some time. Just about my whole friend group and I myself were unable to use Telegram for about an hour or so around the peak of the surge.
- aaomidi 5y agoOther than the 1:30 hour downtime that happened to a lot of old accounts. I actually think it's genius if they throttled old accounts just to let new people see how good telegram is.
- toby- 5y agoSource re 'old accounts'? I have an account as old as you can get, and had no problems, so I'd be interested in proof of a disproportionate impact on older accounts.
- ksaj 5y agoI wonder if they meant longest idle accounts. It would make sense to throttle them if they're just running tmux with an idle shell or ten. Like a bigger renice that shuts off when the process stops being idle.
- throwawaybutwhy 5y agoWhat downtime? There were rumors of degraded video chat capacity, which is a nuisance but not a catastrophe.
- stephencoyner 5y agoNotifications didn't work until about 5PM PDT for me
- dorchadas 5y agoIt didn't work on mobile for me in Ireland for about an hour or so -- couldn't get a call or messages out on WiFi or data, but it worked perfectly fine on my laptop.
- aaomidi 5y agoJust mainly me and two other people. Specifically happened to US users.
- idsout 5y agoI also had minor issues for an hour or so. Messages not sending or loading for example.
- executive 5y agoSending videos was extremely slow/timing out for ~1 hour, ~24h ago
- BTCOG 5y agoSame. No issues.
- pdimitar 5y agoI was sending a few short videos to several contacts (during the FB outage) and the upload speed was something like 20KB/s, whereas normally 2MB are uploaded before I blink. My account is from 2016, if not 2015 even.
- stiltzkin 5y agoI have an old account but images did not load correctly. Seems the experience is not the same on other countries.
- znpy 5y agoOn my phone i only had problems with media, text worked okay. On my laptop instead it was slow until I enabled traffic over ipv6, then it went mostly okay.
- whimsicalism 5y agoThere were definitely some issues some time after noon PST
- hesammelvil 5y agoThat can explain their slowness yesterday!
- hesammelvil 5y agoThat can explain their slow service yesterday!
- stabbles 5y agoAnd one day later close to none of them are messaging over Telegram
- Bud 5y agoWe'll see. The long-term behavior is what's more important. Now those users have the app downloaded, have it set up, and many have tried it out in a real way. All of those are major barriers to adoption, and Telegram has now overcome those barriers. I see that as significant even if it does not result in immediate full adoption of Telegram.
- lucb1e 5y agoIndeed. And don't forget how well Telegram works compared to the competition. If anything will draw them away on convenience grounds (rather than some moral high ground, which was apparently not convincing enough or these new users would have installed an alternative sooner) it will be Telegram.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoMessaging systems "working well" primarily means "the people I want to talk to are using it". Operational failures are a level-zero hurdle to pass, and after that it's all network effect.
- Bud 5y agoI would agree that it's mostly network effect, but I don't agree that it's all network effect. How the app or service works and feels does count, at least a bit. Operational failures are honestly not a big factor unless they happen often. Facebook has had 2 such failures now in the past 3 years. Will this really cost them users? No. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Apple's Messages have all had approximately that same level of reliability.
- lucb1e 5y ago
- kop316 5y agoWhile interesting, I would be curious to see if people stay on Telegram now that WhatsApp is restored.
- advpetc 5y agoLink: https://t.me/durov/170 https://t.me/durov/170
- xerxex 5y agoI swore off whatsapp years ago and never going back! And my uncle was one of them..
- bilal4hmed 5y agoHow many are left after whatsapp returned ? The same thing happen when Signal took off, followed by 3 days of outage that to date has had no explanation. All those people joined and promptly returned to WhatsApp
- ignoramous 5y ago> The same thing happen when Signal took off, followed by 3 days of outage that to date has had no explanation. Wasn't it that Signal effectively DDoS'd themselves? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803010
- bilal4hmed 5y agoIt was never officially acknowledged, just people guessing over git commits
- queuep 5y agoSignal did explain what happened. I can’t remember but there was something about the initial auth that got screwed up on Android and kept retrying. And the retries kind of ddos’ed themselves
- bilal4hmed 5y agoPeople explained but it was never officially explained by Moxie or Signal with a write up of sorts.
- morpheuskafka 5y agoFrom my experience, many friends in Iran strongly prefer Telegram even though it is blocked there are WhatsApp (inexplicably, since they are nearly the same service) isn't. So there does seem to be some brand loyalty in the chat market besides for convenience. I suspect in general their losses were far greater in chat than in Instagram. Most students in the US use both Insta and Snap already and just have some overlapping and some different content on each, so I don't think one being down for a day will seriously bug anyone enough to stop using it.
- finfinfin 5y agoI am used to seeing these numbers when talking about social media but really… 70 mln is a huge number. It’s a total population of many countries.. combined! Retention will be much smaller of course.
- zozin 5y agoFacebook has what, almost three billions users across its platforms? 70M is ~2% of that, so a small percentage. While I too doubt that 70M figure, WhatsApp is the de facto communications application in a lot of countries, with many businesses highly reliant on it. In a pinch, you download something, anything to try to continue messaging.
- finfinfin 5y agoFair point. However, 70 million in a single day is almost unheard of.
- draklor40 5y agoWould be an achievement if they even retain 1% of it as active users.
- thepasswordis 5y agoIs there a way to join telegram without giving them my phone number? That just feels like a honeypot/dataleak waiting to happen.
- tenryuu 5y agoNo
- kleiba 5y agoThat would be a no-go for me too... if I had a phone number. These days, it's actually surprisingly hard to get a free email account without having to provide a phone number.
- zht 5y agohow do you live life without a phone number?
- heleninboodler 5y agoI'd guess "blissfully"
- gleenn 5y agoI did it for a year in Japan, not easy but doable. I also hate giving out my phone number. It's just another way for companies to track users.
- kleiba 5y agoI've never had a phone. I suppose it's harder if I ever had one but since I never had to give up the conveniences, I don't really have a problem with it.
- kleiba 5y agoI'm old.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
- kazinator 5y ago69.99 million won't log in again when the social network they actually wanted is back up. Retentions are more important than subscriptions.
- manquer 5y agoWithout Subscriptions there is no scope for retention. Telegram only directly competes with WhatsApp , not Instagram, FB platform or even Messenger. Social network is of limited value in pure play messaging platform, where everyone is just interested in 1:1 or private group messaging. I don't think anyone cares what network they are on, they care only about where the people they want talk to are at. Yes, it is hard to break the network effort of any social media platform, however once that critical mass is reached, people move very very rapidly.
- hcurtiss 5y agoI feel like Telegram has some big user base out there that organizes into communities. How do I find out about those communities to participate?
- nixpulvis 5y agoOfftopic, but "mln" really!? I swear I read "70 min new users", which is quite confusing. Is "70 Million" really too long? I can't say I've seen this one before so I'm reeling a bit. I saw "ml" used recently and almost had a heart attack, so perhaps I'm wondering why now? SI clearly states "M" no? I'd have kept it short and sweet as "70M", just saying. Heh, or perhaps 70 mega-new-users, but I digress.
- munk-a 5y agoWould it be possible to get a title change from dang ?
- rkoten 5y agoAh, good ol' HN.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nickff 5y agoTwo small notes: - The 'mln' abbreviation was probably used to shorten the title so that it would appear complete on search engine results. - I have also seen "MM" used to shorten "million". I believe that "M" means "Molarity" in SI units, and only means millions when prepended to another SI unit abbreviation.
- nixpulvis 5y ago- I do not understand how 'mln' is more SEO than 'M' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit) states that it's 'mol', but what do I know, I'm not a chemist Without context '70M' should be assumed unitless, and therefor must be interpreted as a power suffix symbol. Better yet, it falls outside the hex range, making life even better for everyone. Perhaps, if I'm really trying to be difficult, we could try to interpret 'M' as a modifier on 'new users', but that seems silly when there's no space between 70 and M. </rambling>
- 5y ago
- jp0d 5y agoSome of my closest friends and I moved to Telegram a few months ago. It's actually quite good. I've to be on WhatsApp as it'd be a pain to teach parents how to use a new app!
- lucb1e 5y agoIt's much more convenient indeed, just be aware (I kinda trust that you, being on HN, already are) that it's all encrypted-to-the-server, so any sysadmin can read or hand over your messages. Choosing between known metadata gathering on WhatsApp and a potential Telegram data breach (intentional or unintentional), it's really a devil's dilemma for me. Since a few months (now that Telegram has failed to deliver on the encryption promise and profit model for many years, making it a bit too shady) I've been moving more and more to Signal (after also trying Keybase, Threema, Wire, Riot/Element, Jami/Ring, and evaluating others), but man usability and features really take a hit with any of them. Enjoy Telegram, but be aware of the trade-off!
- jp0d 5y agoYes, thank you. I wasn't aware of Telegram's shady models. I'll read about it. But its UI is far better than Signal. I don't use FB and their other products, except for WhatsApp. I've disabled all tracking features on IOS just to be safe! :)
- cgb223 5y agoI wonder how Signal did with net new users
- bogidon 5y ago"millions" https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1445164521102979080?s=20 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1445164521102979080?s=2...
- jiltedgen 5y agoWhy, in conversations about chat apps, does telegram get brought up so frequently as a private alternative? Is it not also mostly proprietary the same as whatsapp/messenger whatever? Is it just a matter of a dislike for facebook?
- SXX 5y agoPR. And not being owned by FB. Telegram actually do have ecosystem of open source clients, but on other side E2EE is opt-in that no one uses.
- opan 5y agoVery good point. There's a free-ish client on F-Droid (probably even official), but it's still a proprietary and centralized service. I would not really consider it better than the other proprietary options, but for whatever reason some tech people are into telegram.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoBack in high school when I started using telegram (2010ish?), I started using it because it wasn’t Whatsapp, it wasn’t owned by Facebook, and it had a really great UI. And I didn’t really understand the encryption implications. Today I really wish it had full encryption. It says something about the developers that they’ve avoided default E2E for a full decade or more now. I’m trying to use signal more. But I also have years and years of telegram group chats to migrate…
- ikt 5y ago> It says something about the developers that they’ve avoided default E2E for a full decade or more now. It's by design: https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14 https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...
- whimsicalism 5y agoThe clients are open source, which provides better assurances around the E2E encryption than whatsapp.
- don-code 5y agoI'm actually quite thrilled that end users found a way to communicate in spite of "the everyday solution" being down. That gives me some hope that smaller vendors do stand a chance against incumbents, even in Facebook's space.
- gleenn 5y agoWell, not sure how much smaller vendors have a chance when it takes a historic amount of downtime for this to happen.
- laurent92 5y agoThe chance is a window of 2 to 24 hours every decade, but you’re not sure it will happen… After that, customers go back to the leader.
- AdamHominem 5y agoI'm not particularly thrilled, given Telegram is based in the United Arab Emirates, its client-server encryption is almost purposefully garbage (they basically rolled their own TLS, and predictably researchers keep finding vulnerabilities in "MTProto"), they don't enable e2ee chats by default, and they don't e2ee group chats at all. Do. Not. Use. Telegram.
- otachack 5y agoDon't use it for e2e, then? There are plenty other solutions for incredibly sensitive chats (Signal, Tox, etc) I think Telegram is a good trade off for group chats, personally. It's feature rich compared to others.
- tasogare 5y agoSignal is asking phone number to use, I don't see how this is good for sensitive communication (since metadata alone are often very informative).
- LibertyBeta 5y agoWonder what the retention and falloff rates will be.
- AntwaneB 5y agoI don't believe it for a second.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoWhy not? Six months ago they were already celebrating half a billion users. People don't realize how big Telegram already is.
- nonbirithm 5y agoI think this says more about the significant amount of control Facebook has with its messaging platforms and the implications of them losing that control for even a few hours, rather than who happens to benefit when Facebook's users are forced to find alternatives. What happens to Facebook can now have ramifications for the entire Web. It's gotten to the point where Facebook's userbase can act as a massive DDoS network not out of malice, as what the term usually implies, but because of the sheer number of people in the billions who willingly chose to use Facebook.
- zokier 5y agoSo, maybe <5% of WhatsApp users. Bit less headline grabbing when put that way. Not saying that its completely insignificant number, but considering that most likely all of them will not be leaving WA, or even staying on Telegram, it doesn't sound like major thing either.
- gigatexal 5y ago70M people were so worked up about not being able to use FB they signed up for Telegram -- the not-quite orthogonal alternative? Sounds 'sus
- manquer 5y agoIt is WhatsApp and Messenger users who were moving, if you need to talk to someone right now and the platform both of you were using is not working for hours, then it is not surprising people moved to another platform quickly, especially if phone calls/sms are not feasible (expensive/international/no video etc) Few people have that much brand loyalty to delay communication with all their friends and family when a platform is down for so long and there is viable alternative available. It is not because they ideologically cared either way, they just want a platform that is easy to use and other person is ready use as well.
- sairahul82 5y agoMy problem with telegram is, 60% of my friends joined when whatsapp changed terms. After that I got no messages. Essentially most of them are dormant. It would be great to find out the percentage of active users in Telegram vs Whatsapp.
- farmerstan 5y agoIs telegram better than signal? I vaguely remember hearing about Telegram having nefarious roots so I never investigated further.
- pkulak 5y agoI don't think so, personally. Everyone on here is going off on how great of a UI experience Telegram is, so I just downloaded it and signed in to my old account. Seems fine. No complaints. But Signal has message reactions and E2E at all times. What are people fawning over Telegram for? I guess a benefit is that Telegram store messages on the server, so if you sign in with a new device you get all your messages, not just the new ones. But that's why I use Matrix now; security of Signal with the UI features of Telegram.
- ggregoire 5y agoMakes me wonder if people even remember that SMS is a thing. Seems to me like the most obvious solution when your communication app is temporarily unavailable. Instead of the annoying process to look for an alternative app, download it, sign in, add contacts… just for a few hours. Or people thought Whatsapp & Messenger were gone forever and they were looking for a long term replacement?
- noahtallen 5y agoI mean, SMS or even MMS is a terrible standard for modern chats, especially group chats. Compared to Telegram, it’s slower, has terrible multimedia support, poor UX, limits on group size, limits on character counts, etc. Not to mention security or privacy. Plus, most of the group chat apps will integrate with contacts and your phone number anyways.
- ggregoire 5y agoI wouldn't definitely replace WhatsApp or Telegram with SMS, but for 3 hours it did the job for me and my contacts.
- approxim8ion 5y agoSMS isn't a viable option for a lot of people. It's probably the least private or secure form of messaging available, and quite often isn't very reliable, at least in my country.. I understand when you say it is a fallback, but it's a very lousy one in my opinion.
- ggregoire 5y agoYou raise a good point, although I doubt 70 millions of people were actually looking for a "private or secure form of messaging". They wouldn't use Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger in the first place if it was the case.
- approxim8ion 5y agoYou're not wrong either. Of course, for all their signalling (pun not intended), it's not like Telegram fares much better on that front so you're probably right that security/privacy aren't the first priority. Creature comforts like group chats/stickers/GIFs, VOIP etc from the same app might be more compelling.
- xtartupsHQ 5y agoWell, most of them must have not been sure of when things are going to fall in place. Nevertheless, we got to stay off scrolling and have some important conversations. Glad that we now have many alternative channels for seamless communication.