Facebook blamed it on a faulty configuration change, however, the outage turned out to be a stroke of luck for its rivals Telegram and Signal.

The global outage on Monday kept 3.5 billion users from accessing Facebook’s major services including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Also Read - WhatsApp users can edit sent messages: Here’s how it will work Telegram gains over 70 million users in a day following Facebook’s global outage The social app’s founder and chief executive Pavel Durov announced the massive calling it a “record increase in user registration and activity”. The non-profit Signal Foundation based in Silicon Valley, which currently oversees the app, was launched in February 2018 with Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook, providing initial funding of $50 million.Telegram, the underdog in the social media hub managed to gain over 70 million users during Facebook’s six-hour-long global outage. The error does not affect the security of the chat, the company added. On Android if you see 'Bad encrypted message,' tap the menu in the top-right & tap 'Reset secure session.' On iOS tap the 'Reset Session' button below 'Received message was out of sync.' The errors do not affect chat security & will be automatically fixed in the next app update. Signal users might see errors in some chats as a side effect to the outage, but will be resolved in the next update of the app, the company said in a tweet. Read | Messaging app Signal experiencing technical difficulties

Signal has seen a rise in downloads following a change in WhatsApp's privacy terms, which required WhatsApp users to share their data with both Facebook Inc and Instagram.

Signal said on Saturday it had restored its services a day after the application faced technical difficulties as it dealt with a flood of new users after rival messaging app WhatsApp announced a controversial change in privacy terms.

Signal messenger outage