You told us: You were using WhatsApp's rivals even before Facebook crashed

The planet came to a grinding halt last week as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went offline. The issue was caused by a troublesome configuration change, a blip that might’ve cost Facebook and its properties big in terms of revenue and users.

Telegram announced soon after that it added 70 million users to its ranks in the wake of the crash, and we imagine other WhatsApp rivals like Signal also onboarded their fair share. But were you one of these people who signed up for these two WhatsApp rivals or an alternative chat app during this period? We asked our readers in this recent poll, and the results are now in.

Did you sign up for Signal or Telegram when Facebook services went down?

Results

We saw over 1,700 votes on this poll published on October 6, 2021. A whopping 62.3% of those respondents use “one of both of these services” even before the great Facebook outage of 2021.

Interestingly, 17.9% of readers decided to wait it out and resisted the urge to sign up for an alternative messaging platform.

A total of 18.3% of readers signed up for either Telegram or Signal, with the majority (10.3%) going for the latter. Finally, 1.5% of the respondents on this poll signed up for another messaging service altogether.

Your comments

• • Stanley Jason: Basically, Signal is just one feature of Telegram, which is Secret Chats. So I rather stick to a more versatile app.
  • FNU Vikas: I deleted WhatsApp account, when they updated their T&C to share data with FB. I switched to Telegram, it’s light years ahead of WhatsApp.
  • roaduardo: There’s no point if you can’t convince your contacts to also make the switch. That’s the biggest problem here. It’s all about what the people you speak with consistently. What service they use. And if you want to use a new one? Good luck trying to bring them along.
  • Bmswad1: Discord is also good.
  • Sang Ngaihte: Google Messages… I like that app. I can send images and video clips. As long as I have an internet connection.

That’s it for this poll. Thanks for voting and commenting. If you have any additional thoughts, be sure to drop a comment below.