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Former Whatsapp Users Bring Telegram to its Knees

posted by Dopefish on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the there-is-no-viable-alternative dept.
girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

"A mere three days after Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp, the popular smartphone messaging app suffered a major service outage that lasted three and a half hours. Left to their own devices, Whatsapp users worldwide went rushing to its rival apps, including secure chat provider Telegram. The surge in new users quickly turned into a tidal wave that brought Telegram's service to its knees:

The SMS gateways we use to send registration codes are overloaded and slow 100 SMS per second is too much. Trying to find a solution.

In its official twitter, Telegram announced that more than 1.8 million new users had joined on Saturday, Feb 22. Four hours later, it reported an additional 800 thousand.

Telegram's messaging service, which uses 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange, began enjoying a spike in popularity after Whatsapp's acquisition. Although it has released the source code for its java libraries and all its official clients, its server software is still closed source."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:40PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:40PM (#5263)

    It's a pretty flimsy thing to pay 16 billion dollars for when a three hour outage sends millions of your customers off to a superior competing service. It does certainly put a lot of pressure on the infrastructure support people at least.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Debvgger on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:51PM

    by Debvgger (545) on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:51PM (#5268)

    That's the problem with fads. There's zero loyalty from your users, because they only want the same their sheep friends have, and don't really care about it or even what it is or how good it is. So, here's an idea for you Microsoft: Give free Windows Phones to the alpha guys out there! :-) ... Try to at least make them like the phone a bit, of course, if that's even possible.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxim on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:18PM

      by maxim (2543) <maximlevitsky@gmail.com> on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:18PM (#5283)

      Won't work. The hate toward Microsoft is too high among general public.
      They might use Windows but only because they have to.

      Well, if give any advice to MS is maybe somehow be very careful and not mention anything Windows
      when selling a product.

      Btw, that did work with the XBOX, even thought it also probably runs something windows derived.

      Also, btw, the same sadly applies to Linux brand, peoples also scare the hell out of them when they hear 'Linux',
      thats why Google tries not to mention that Android is Linux based....

      Its our fault, can't not admit this.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by girlwhowaspluggedout on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:44PM

    by girlwhowaspluggedout (1223) on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:44PM (#5294)
    Actually, it might not matter whether Whatsapp's current users will stay faithful to it. Even if Whatsapp remains userless, Facebook owns their personal data. That is, this was perhaps not about the users at all, but about the easily monetizable userlist. Facebook has finally acquired the commodity it had hoped to acquire these past few years -- cellphone numbers; an advertiser's boon.
    --
    Soylent is the best disinfectant.

    • (Score: 1) by c0lo on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:10PM

      by c0lo (156) on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:10PM (#5321)

      Facebook owns their personal data.

      Which rots quickly with every minute that passes. If not refreshed, two years down the road will make the data next to useless (unless FB switches its business profile to an archive institution).

      Does a snapshot in time really worth $16B? I doubt it, but... hey... what do I know?