Telegram was the biggest winner from this week's Facebook outage

Telegram, one of WhatsApp’s fastest growing competitors benefited greatly from Facebook’s outage this week.

“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours,” Founder Pavel Durov said on his Telegram channel this week. “Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”

Facebook’s outage, while shortlived, does raise the question of the wisdom of entrusting so much of our communication to one company. As we’ve seen in this past week, failure not only disrupted personal communication, but also those of small business. Companies rely on WhatsApp business and Facebook Messenger to reach their customers, and many advertisers make their hay on Facebook.

Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.

— Meta (@Meta) March 14, 2019

Officially, Facebook blames a server configuration change for its outage.