Telegram suddenly skyrocketed to the top free app in over 46 countries last weekend after WhatsApp went offline for about four hours. During the outage an estimated 5 million people signed up for the new messaging service in lieu of WhatsApp, the popular messaging service which was recently bought by Facebook in a $19 billion merger. Telegram topped several other social networking messaging apps such as Kik, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

It was a rather large surprise that so many people suddenly switched to Telegram when the other social networking apps had the advantage of having several hundreds of millions of users in the first place, such as Facebook Messenger. The sudden popularity came as no surprise to Markus Ria of Telegram, who revealed that the messaging app had already been the top choice service in several Latin American countries including Spanish and Arabic speaking countries for some time now.

What's more, Telegram's vast popularity was largely in place before Facebook signed a partnership deal with WhatsApp. It seems that when problems took place and WhatsApp went down, the effect of Telegram's popularity simply spread across several countries. Needless to say, WhatsApp's service outage may have cost it millions of members, or at least created some dual users.

According to App Annie, a top app analytics site, Telegram had already started getting higher on the list as the most downloaded social networking app even before the WhatsApp merger deal with Facebook was revealed. It started climbing the charts around Feb. 17.

According to Telegram users, it is a perfect messaging app since it combines the speed of WhatsApp and the advanced security measures of Snapchat. In fact, many people believe that the surge of Telegram users was not just brought about by WhatsApp problems, and could see sustained growth for a while by offering the best of other messaging apps combined with enhanced security features. The app was built by the Russian Durov brothers who are also behind the largest social network in the country called VKontakte or VK.