UPDATED 21:59 EDT / MARCH 29 2018

APPS

Telegram raises $850M more in ICO as messaging service suffers major downtime

Encrypted-messaging startup Telegram Messenger LLC has raised an additional $850 million in its initial coin offering even as the service suffered serious downtime today.

The figure, reported in a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, came from the second stage of its ICO after it already raised $850 million in its ICO presale in February.

So far, Telegram has raised a staggering $1.7 billion in its ICO. But it’s not even finished yet. The company originally said it intended to cap the ICO at $2 billion.

The the identities of individuals and companies investing in the ICO have not been disclosed. But CoinTelegraph reported that one of the investors in the first round of the ICO was Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich with a $300 million investment, while other investors include Sergei Solonin, the founder of payment service provider Qiwi, and David Yakobashvili, founder of Wimm-Bill-Dann foods.

Telegram itself may be well-pleased by the success of its ICO, but the same can’t be said for its users. The company’s messaging service suffered major downtime in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and elsewhere this morning. In a post on Telegram, founder and Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov said there was an issue with a data center provider.

“Every service growing too fast is bound to experience growing pains; unfortunately, Telegram is no exception, although we strive to be one,” Durov wrote. “Many of our European users noticed connection issues earlier today. Those were caused by planned maintenance by our data center provider, which unfortunately lead to unplanned downtime. Thanks to Telegram’s distributed infrastructure, Americas and East Asia were not affected by the issues.”

The outage comes at a period of massive growth for Telegram, possibly driven in part by the outrage over Facebook’s data sharing scandal. According to a tweet by Durov, Telegram now has 200 million users and is adding 700,000 new users per day, with year-on-year growth now passing 70 percent.

Image: Telegram

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU