AS Facebook-owned social media companies experienced a shutdown, the Twittersphere did not waste time in recommending alternatives. High up in the list is Telegram, which is seen as an alternative to WhatsApp. Apple’s iMessenger was another messaging tool, which was recommended by many Twitter users, as people were looking for alternatives to stay connected.
Earlier this year, downloads of privacy-focused messaging apps Signal and Telegram got a boost, as users looked for alternatives to Facebook-owned WhatsApp, over concerns about changes to the service’s privacy policy.
Signal saw about 7.5 million installs globally, through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, between January 6 and January 10, according to Sensor Tower. Interestingly, Signal was founded by the WhatsApp co-founder, who later left the company due to pressure from Mark Zuckerberg, and privacy issues related to Facebook-owned products.
Meanwhile, Telegram saw 5.6 million downloads globally, in a matter of days, according to Apptopia. Signal claims to have “state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption” as part of its service, which prevents messages from being read by those who are not the intended recipient.
Both Signal and Telegram were also down in recent weeks.
The Signal account tweeted: “Hold tight, folks! Signal is currently down, due to a hosting outage affecting parts of our service. We’re working on bringing it back up.”
Favoured by many because of its privacy stance, Signal is widely regarded as one of the safest messaging apps around.
Another alternative communications platform is Slack, which is mainly for businesses. This tool was also a victim of a DNS attack, which brought it down.
The Slack communications team tweeted: “We are aware of connectivity issues related to DNS that are impacting a small sub set of users. This issue was caused by our own change and not related to any third-party DNS software and services.”
Slack encouraged users to reach out to their internet service providers for assistance.
“In order to resolve this faster, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will need to flush their DNS record for slack.com. Please reach out to your networking team to provide them with this information,” the company continued.
