Telegram has more than 500 million users after recent influx

Chat service Telegram passed 500 million monthly active users in the first week of January. Telegram also reports an increase of 25 million active users in recent days, of which a quarter are from Europe.

Telegram boss Pavel Durov writes in a Telegram message that the service passed 500 million in the first week of January and then grew again. Significantly faster than last year, when an average of 1.5 million new users signed up for the service every day. There have been spikes in new users before, but “this time it’s different,” he says.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov

The main reason for the growth seems to be the recent update to the privacy terms for WhatsApp, which seems to require users outside of Europe to share WhatsApp account information with Facebook for advertising purposes. Durov immediately opens the attack on Facebook in his post: “People no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have the critical mass of users.”

In April last year, Telegram reported having 400 million monthly active users. In March 2018 there were 200 million and in February 2016 100 million. Telegram was founded in 2013. Although there are no figures yet on the number of active WhatsApp users after the new privacy terms, the service had more than two billion users last year.

Open source messaging service Signal has also seen a huge increase in users in recent days. It warned users that it may therefore take longer to receive verification codes. Signal is known for not storing any user information at all. Telegram stores contact details, contacts and the user ID. That’s still significantly less than WhatsApp, which collects account information, contacts, status, payments, user logs, device information, location, cookies, ad data, user ID, and more. WhatsApp and Signal use end-to-end encryption by default. Telegram has that option in secure chats, Durov explains in this post.