25 MILLION users join social media alternative Telegram as people walk away from Big Tech

The instant messaging service Telegram has seen skyrocketing numbers of new users in the past week, with 25 million new users joining the platform in just three days, Reclaim the Net reports.

"In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone," Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday.

"People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users," he continued.

The surge in new users at Telegram comes amid a crackdown on conservative voices on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, a trend which significantly escalated following the storming of Capitol Hill by pro-Trump rioters on Jan 6.

Some have questioned whether Telegram will be able to manage to remain usable after big tech giants Apple, Google, and Amazon worked together to strongarm the social media site Parler off the internet. The site's app was removed from Apple's app store and Google's play store in the wake of the riot, and was later removed from the internet entirely after Amazon banned them from their web hosting service.

In response to such questions, Durov has encouraged his users to avoid Apple products and to use self-hosted AKPs to download the app to Android phones. He also says a version of Telegram is being constructed to run on Safari, rather than solely on the "native app."