Twenty million new users joined Telegram messenger in the last 72 hours alone, the messenger’s founder Pavel Durov said Tuesday.
“In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone,” Durov wrote in his English-language Telegram blog.
According to Durov, 38 percent of new users came from Asia, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Latin America, 8 percent from the Middle East and North Africa.
Telegram like Signal messaging apps have been seeing a sudden increase in demand after larger rival WhatsApp’s updated terms of service raised eyebrows on social media.
According to data analytics firm Sensor Tower, more than 100000 users installed Signal across the app stores of Apple and Google in the last two days, while Telegram picked up nearly 2.2 million downloads.
Last week, Facebook-owned messenger app, which uses Signal’s encryption technology, introduced new terms, requesting users to agree and allow Facebook and its subsidiaries to collect user data, including their phone number and location.
The new privacy policy attracted widespread criticism from tech experts and app users.
Editor-In-Chief of Fast Company (SA) magazine, Wesley Diphoko, says the new move is a 180 degrees reversal from Facebook.
He says when Facebook Inc bought WhatsApp, it assured users that their data would remain private.
Telegram is a cross-platform cloud-based instant messaging, video calling, and VoIP service which was founded by a Russian IT entrepreneur Pavel Durov. The platform was launched in 2013 and around 200 million customers have since started using the app.