Telegram reached 500 million monthly active users in 2021.
Telegram announced that it had surpassed about 500 million monthly active users in the first week of January 2021. Founder Pavel Durov said that 25 million new users had joined during the preceding 72 hours, creating a dramatic short-term surge.
The growth came amid widespread concern about WhatsApp’s planned privacy-policy changes, which encouraged many people to explore alternative messaging services. Telegram had already grown steadily: it reported 100 million monthly active users in 2016, 200 million in 2018, and 400 million in April 2020.
The milestone refers to monthly active users, meaning accounts that used the service during a month. It should not be confused with Telegram’s download figures, which reached 1 billion worldwide downloads later in 2021, or with the 70 million additional users Telegram said joined during Facebook’s major outage in October 2021. Telegram later passed 700 million monthly active users in 2022 and 900 million in March 2024.