By now the downtime suffered by Facebook and several of its services on Monday evening are well documented. While the tech giant was able to get things up and running again, one of WhatsApp’s competitors, Telegram, had a banner day as a result.

This as Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov explained in a blog post that the platform saw a record number of registrations following Facebook’s outage.

More specifically, he notes that over 70 million people joined Telegram as a result.

“Yesterday Telegram experienced a record increase in user registration and activity. 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 noted.

“I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” added Durov.

With Facebook suffering other issues in the wake of the outage, such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing $7 billion and hearings currently underway involving a whistleblower, Durov also took the opportunity to aim a jab at the tech giant.

“For the new users I’d like to say this – welcome to Telegram, the largest independent messaging platform. We won’t fail you when others will,” he concluded.

While Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are still the dominant mobile messaging services for many, given the recent outage as well as the mass exodus following a poorly communicated change in policy at the beginning of 2021, it looks like users are growing increasingly frustrated with Facebook and willing to take a risk on a service that better prioritises privacy.