Encrypted Messaging App Telegram Hits 100M Monthly Active Users, 350k New Users Each Day

That didn’t take long. Telegram launched just two and a half years ago and is today announcing at Mobile World Congress 2016 it has 100,000,000 monthly active users.

Shortly after launching, the messaging app claimed it had 100,000 users communicating on its encrypted platform and then in December 2014 there was 50 million active users, who were generating 1 billion messages daily.

Now, in February 2016, Telegram says it has 100,000,000 monthly active users, 350,000 new users each day and there are 15 billion messages generated daily — all over a secure and encrypted system.

Facebook reported last month that Messenger had 800 million monthly active users and Whatsapp claims to have 1 billion monthly users as of a few weeks ago.

Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched VK (originally called VKontakte) in 2006, began working on Telegram in early 2012 as a research project because they wanted to create something that was “really secure and fun at the same time.” Telegram launched just shortly after Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and PRISM.

But the growth of Telegram has come with a fair amount of scrutiny as the app has been accused of facilitating and hiding terrorist communication.

“Privacy, ultimately, is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” Pavel Durov told TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Unsurprisingly, during his MWC 2016 keynote, Durov threw his support behind Tim Cook.