In a series of tweets, the Facebook-owned messaging app confirmed it is pushing back the date from February 2021 to May, for now.

“Thank you to everyone who’s reached out. We’re still working to counter any confusion by communicating directly with WhatsApp users,” the company tweeted late on Friday (January 15).

“No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8, and we’ll be moving back our business plans until after May,” it said.

Whatsapp also published a blog post titled “Giving More Time for Our Recent Update” where it claimed that it would be giving everyone more time to understand the changes.

“We’ve heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update. There’s been a lot of misinformation causing concern, and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts,” the company wrote.

“WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays between you. This means we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see these private messages. It’s why we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location, and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook,” it said.

After explaining its reservations, the company said, “We’re now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8.”

“We’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security work on

WhatsApp. We’ll then go to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15.”

The last 10 days have seen WhatsApp mired in a wave of controversy regarding privacy and user data. The company told users to accept certain terms and conditions or face deletion of their account.

WhatsApp rivals like Signal and Telegram have seen a massive surge in downloads and installs. Both the platform claim to be more secure than WhatsApp. WhatsApp has maintained that chats will remain secure and no one will see them. But the issue has been sharing of certain user data with Facebook and perhaps third-party apps, which has made users look for other options like Signal and Telegram.

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Along with another encrypted app, Telegram, Signal has been the main beneficiary of online outrage around the changes announced last week, which require WhatsApp users to share their data with both Facebook and Instagram.

Telegram said on Wednesday it had surpassed 500 million active users globally. Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook and then co-founding the Signal Foundation, declined to give equivalent data for Signal but said that the expansion in recent days had been “vertical”. “We’ve seen unprecedented growth this past week,” Acton said in an email to Reuters.

He also said Signal was working to improve its video and group chat functions, making it a better user-friendly messaging app than WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and other conferencing apps.

Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline.

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