It’s quite clear that some people just don’t like Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). When the social network purchased Instagram it led to a fairly sizable exodus with hundreds of thousands of users immediately deleting their accounts. Now, it’s happening again with WhatsApp.
In addition to these issues, WhatsApp went down on Saturday after a network router outage. While WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum was apologizing for the outage, millions of others took to the iTunes Store and Google Play Store and downloaded Telegram, a very similar messaging app.
A fickle public
WhatsApp enjoys 450 million monthly users and a brief outage will hardly bite into these numbers much. That said, it shows just how fickle people can be and brings into question whether or not Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may have grossly over-payed for a messaging app that has so many potential competitors.
This clamor for Telegram ended up pushing the app to the number four spot on the App Store yesterday and the number one spot for iPhone apps in 48 countries. Sadly, for Telegram the addition of nearly five million new users brought its own outage and the company was forced to stop the sharing of photos in Europe where the majority of downloads occurred.
Telegram bills itself as a messaging app that focuses on privacy and security, something that, quite frankly, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is unable to do with any real conviction or belief from its users. Rarely a week goes by when the Internet is not awash with new Facebook privacy issues.
As Telegram surges, BBM left in the cold
Somewhat surprisingly, Telegram received the largest benefits from the outage rather than BlackBerry messenger. Given that five million people downloaded a new messaging app the people in Waterloo working at BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) must certainly be a little miffed by the fact that more users didn’t seek out a tried and true app that just went cross-platform in the last six months.
Whether or not Telegram is able to continue its new-found popularity remains to be seen, but this weekend certainly didn’t hurt.
