As Facebook’s family of apps including WhatsApp and Instagram suffered technical difficulties, security-focused Telegram said 3 million users signed up to its service.

On his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov (pictured) wrote: “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.”

The gain is significant: in March 2018, Durov said Telegram had been used by 200 million people in the space of 30 days.

While Durov did not connect the Facebook outage to the spike in users, a source told TechCrunch: “These outages always drive new users”.

On 13 March, a partial outage affected Facebook users globally. It that lasted more than 14 hours and was said to be the biggest interruption suffered by the social network.

Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users also had trouble accessing services.

Facebook had to turn to rival Twitter to explain that “some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

It has given no explanation for the cause of the outage, but later said in a tweet that it was “not related to a DDoS attack.”