Is Telegram emerging as WhatsApp's biggest competitor?

New Delhi: Following WhatsApp's brief outage last week, millions of users reportedly jumped to a few months old messaging app Telegram. According to Telegram, almost 5 million people signed up on Telegram on Sunday, making it the No. 1 iPhone app in 48 countries.

Following the WhatsApp buyout, "the app's (Telegram) growth rate increased around 3x to 800,000 - 1 million new downloads a day across iOS, Android and Windows," said TechCrunch quoted Durov (creator of the app) as saying.

WhatsApp was down for more than three hours on Saturday just days after Facebook bought it for $19 billion. Jan Koum, the company's co-founder, later issued an apology and blamed a network router for the outage of the mobile messaging app.

Focusing emphasis on privacy and security, Telegram says their app, unlike WhatsApp, is heavily encrypted. It lets users access messages from several devices (including desktops) and lets them share an unlimited number of photos, videos and documents (doc, zip, mp3, etc).

Telegram for iPhone was launched on August 14, 2013. The alpha version of Telegram for Android was officially launched on October 20, 2013.

Telegram is supported by Pavel and Nikolai Durov. Pavel supports Telegram financially and ideologically, while Nikolai's input is technological.