Telegram claims to have over 500 million active users worldwide.
Telegram claims to have over 500 million active users worldwide.

TELEGRAM has hit the jackpot. The controversial messaging application has reached the milestone of one billion downloads - just on Android. The feat is due in large part to Facebook's recent global outage.

The bosses of Telegram must be rubbing their hands together. The messaging application was able to take advantage of the giant outage experienced by the Facebook group, and therefore WhatsApp, in early October. On the Android download platform, Google Play Store, Telegram now counts more than a billion installations. A global success that allows it to enter the exclusive club of apps downloaded more than a billion times.

After the global outage that rendered Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger apps unavailable, users headed en masse to Telegram to send their messages. Circumstances that Pavel Dourov, the Russian founder of Telegram, delighted in when he revealed that he had gained more than 70 million new users in just 24 hours: "The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day," he revealed on his Telegram account. "[A] record increase in user registration and activity," which logically led to an increase in downloads of the application.

Back in August 2021, Telegram benefited from the WhatsApp scandal to reach one billion downloads worldwide.

While Facebook currently finds itself in a state of turmoil, the American giant can being one of the very few applications downloaded more than five billion times, like WhatsApp.