Telegram App Outage
As you may know, Scratchbac ourselves started as a Telegram bot last year. Since then, it has been helping our 60,000 users interact and communicate every day.
But did you notice that a drop in our bot's responsiveness a couple of days ago? In fact, this wasn't a bug on Scratchbac's end but rather Telegram itself was down. On Nov. 25, at 6:25 pm, reports flooded in from around the world that the messaging app appeared to be down.
Glitchy Telegram bot It's unfortunate when situations like this affect the experience of our users. Then again, this probably isn't the only time you've noticed that our bot lags or freezes. Sometimes, buttons like "message user" simply don't behave right. Instances like these are largely caused by technical limitations posed by the Telegram Bot development framework. Despite our best efforts, there are many things that we simply cannot control while working with Telegram's internal system - especially as our community grows bigger and bigger.
The solution - a standalone app
We have known this problem for quite some time now and always knew that for us to deliver a more stable service to our users, we would eventually have to move away from Telegram. The recent outage just further strengthens our case to become self-reliant.
But of course, that is not the only reason for building an app. Better usability, new functions, more robust security are all key improvements that will be enabled in our new app. At this point, we have an early app version ready to launch which means we’re 75% there. But there's still crucial features the app needs and it’s that last 25% that’s most challenging. With one big final push, we can actually get Scratchbac to those who want it as bad as we do. For that to happen, we need to grow our team with experts in software and app development. This is the reason for our recent Kickstarter campaign and we hope we can have your support! Want to be one of the first to use the app? Click here to get notified the moment we launch!