Technology

Snapchat use surges during Facebook’s six-hour global outage

Platform biggest winner among rivals with 23% boost in time spent on Android app

Facebook blamed network configuration glitches for immobilising a suite of apps and driving some of its 2.7 billion daily users to the competition

Wed Oct 6 2021 - 08:15

Snapchat use surged more than 20 per cent after Facebook’s services went down for six hours on Monday, the biggest winner among rival apps during the US social media giant’s worst outage in years.

Facebook blamed network configuration glitches for immobilising a suite of apps from Messenger to Instagram and driving some of its 2.7 billion daily users to the competition. Snap saw a 23 per cent boost in time spent on its Android app on Monday compared with the same day the prior week, according to Sensor Tower data shared with Bloomberg News.

That led gains in activity on apps from Telegram and Signal to Twitter and ByteDance’s TikTok on October 4th, the mobile researcher said. The service disruption, which Facebook blamed on a faulty network configuration change, hit small businesses and gave ammunition to critics and legislators arguing that the company has grown into an unwieldy monopoly that should be cut down to size.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said his app added 70 million users and set new highs for registrations and activity on Monday. It jumped to the top of the iPhone App Store as the most-downloaded free app in 40 markets, while Signal was number one in Poland and in the top 10 in 35 markets, Sensor Tower said.

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Alternatives such as Telegram, which closely matches the look and functionality of WhatsApp, have historically added millions of users every time the world’s most popular messenger has had a significant outage, though many quickly return to the Facebook app once it’s back online.

"We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure," Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a note to employees on Tuesday. "The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services." – Bloomberg

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