Last week, a 24 hour Facebook outage saw over 3 million users sign up for the free messaging service Telegram.

The outage saw popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all go down for a period of time, which affected the apps worldwide.

As a result, social media users decided to jump onto Telegram’s service during the outage, which gave a significant boost in activity for the free platform.

Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov posted a statement from his Telegram account during the outage when a large number of users began hopping onto Telegram.

“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours. Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone," Durov said.

Telegram is a free encrypted messaging service that runs on user donations rather than a targeted ads model that platforms like Facebook and Instagram currently use for monetisation.

Telegram emphasizes protecting user privacy as one of its main features, despite security experts questioning just how secure the platform actually is. As of March 2018, Telegram had over 200 million active users on its platform.