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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: 5, Informative) by mtrycz on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:16PM

    by mtrycz (60) on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:16PM (#5282)

    The problem I have with Telegram, and the reason I haven't installed it (yet?) is that the project has been sponsored by Pavel Durov, russian millionaire and "philantrope", the person behind VKontakte (the russian equivalent of Facebook) that has beed dubbed "russia's Zuckeberg".

    I'm not fleeing one corporate overlord for another.

    Also, as many already stated, the E2E encryption is not the default (but still possible?), when can we have that?

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by beckett on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:05PM

    by beckett (1115) on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:05PM (#5316)

    good point about swapping corporate overlords.

    However, we might be optimistic about the people that are choosing to leave Whatsapp for what is supposedly a service with better privacy policies. At least this indicates people in the Whatsapp demographic are aware of and sensitive to wholesale surveillance, and will take action to preserve personal privacy. If the general public are aware of these issues to digital privacy, metadata, and data mining the next generation of killer apps will have to consider these issues seriously.

  • (Score: 1) by hash14 on Monday February 24 2014, @01:49AM

    by hash14 (1102) on Monday February 24 2014, @01:49AM (#5588)

    They have an open API, so you could conceivably patch/fork the existing client (or write your own) with that as the default setting.