WhatsApp’s major competitor is Telegram. This software, created by the brothers Nikolái and Pável Drov, whose offices are in Dubai, offers an enormous variety of appealing features for iOS and Android users, the latter being the most popular platform. According to a recent statistic, Pável Drov’s application has received over 1,000 million downloads on Google Play.

The servers of WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram all went down on October 4th. Users were unable to connect to their accounts, send or receive messages, much alone post for several hours. These apps were essentially useless, both in their iOS and Android versions and on the web.

As a result, a large number of people have downloaded Telegram on their Android phones in order to stay in touch with their family, friends, and coworkers, among others. This switch from WhatsApp to the Telegram app was so successful that it managed to sign up up to 70 million new users on the same day, October 4.

Since then, the Dubai-based instant messaging software has continued to flourish, with Telegram just reaching 1 billion downloads on the Google Play Store, according to a recent report.

This is how the paper plane’s instant messaging service has risen to become the world’s fourth most popular app, despite the fact that it still behind WhatsApp and Messenger, which both have 5,000 million downloads on Google Play Store.