Telegram global MAU 2024

As of July 2024, cloud-based mobile messaging app Telegram reported 950 million monthly active users worldwide. Telegram is a chat app launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. The pair had previously founded the Russian social network VK, which they left when it was taken over by the Mail.ru Group.

In 2023, the majority of Telegram’s global audience, was comprised by users aged between 25 and 34 years. Among the reasons to use Telegram, 80 percent of the platform’s users reported to “learn the majority of the news from Telegram.” After the announcement that WhatsApp was going to release a new privacy policy update was met with criticism in 2021, Telegram's audience and popularity spiked, bringing global downloads to 167 million.

Telegram security criticism

Despite claiming to be more secure than other mainstream messengers such as LINE or WhatsApp, Telegram has been frequently criticized by industry experts such as German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). One of the key points of criticism is Telegram’s failure to provide automatic end-to-end encryption (WhatsApp and LINE messenger have end-to-end encryption set up by default).

Number of monthly active Telegram users worldwide from March 2014 to July 2024 (in millions)

Characteristic	Number of monthly active users in millions
Jul '24	950
Mar '24	900
Jul '23	800
Nov '22	700
Apr '22	500
Apr '20	400
Mar '18	200
Dec '17	180
Feb '16	100
Sep '15	60
Dec '14	50
Mar '14	35

Loading statistic...

Download

Source

Show detailed source information?

Already a member?

Sources

Use Ask Statista Research Service

Release date

July 2024

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

March 2014 to July 2024

Supplementary notes

No data available for missing periods.

In April 2020, the company posted on their blog: "Telegram has reached 400,000,000 monthly users, up from 300 million a year ago."

The company's FAQ page reports: "Telegram has over 700 million monthly active users and is one of the 10 most downloaded apps in the world."

The value of 800 million MAU was give on Pavel Durov's personal Telegram channel in July 2023.

Citation formats