OREANDA-NEWS. Telegram messenger founder Pavel Durov announced in his Telegram channel on Tuesday evening, October 5, that on the eve of a large-scale failure in the social networks Facebook and Instagram, as well as Whatsapp messenger, more than 70 million new users registered in Telegram.

According to Durov, in particular, in North and South America, millions of users tried to register in the messenger created by him at the same time, which led to a slowdown in its work.

Facebook Instagram, as well as Whatsapp messenger, were unable to open their accounts for several hours due to a large-scale malfunction. In addition, some Facebook employees could not physically get into their offices, as their electronic keys did not work. According to Pavel Durov, Telegram is «the largest independent platform for sending messages». «We will not let you down when others do», he wrote.

At the end of September, Telegram faced a wave of criticism in Russia after, during the elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation, the messenger blocked the bot of the «Smart voting» team of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Then Durov justified this decision by the senselessness of fighting with the Russian regulator without the support of Apple and Google and pointed out that the demand of the Russian authorities to remove the Telegram bot «was not clearly unconstitutional».