Sharing some interesting facts about Telegram Messenger, one of the most popular messaging apps.
- Telegram is the 5th instant messaging app with the most users in the world. As of 2020 statistics, Telegram has 500 million monthly users. On Android, around 500,000+ users join Telegram daily, and on iOS, it’s about 100,000 users.
- Telegram founder Pavel Durov is one of the biggest critics of WhatsApp. When WhatsApp faces outage issues, Telegram makes the most of it. During the time when WhatsApp was banned in Brazil in 2016, Telegram claimed on Twitter that they had gained 7 million users in the first 24 hours alone.
- In 2019, during the global Facebook outage, Telegram gained 3 million users, and in the 2021 Facebook outage, it gained 70 million users within a day.
- Telegram was blocked in Russia until 2020, which is considered the home country of Telegram. Surprisingly, Russia uses Telegram the most.
- Spain, Argentina, and Israel are the other countries with the most Telegram users.
- Telegram is blocked in China and Pakistan.
- Telegram doesn’t have a fixed office! After the Russian intervention, Durov works by travelling with a small group of engineers through various countries. As of a 2018 tweet, they’re in Dubai now.
- In 2019, Israel arrested the leader and team of a network named Telegrass. Reason? It was an illegal drug distribution network that used Telegram.
- Since Telegram gives importance to privacy, terrorist groups like ISIS use Telegram for their activities. Due to this, some media outlets call Telegram a Jihadi messaging app.
- In 2014, Telegram announced two cryptography contests with $200,000 and $300,000 in prize money. The contest didn’t have any winners, and Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal and a security researcher, didn’t like how the contest was run.
Source: Wikipedia
