WhatsApp Goes WhatsDown

It was a rough Saturday night. People spent hours clutching their phones waiting for the double tick sign showing a delivered message on WhatsApp in vain. The night was rough because a lot of people were agitated as a result of the 210 minute WhatsApp outage. WhatsApp has become one of the most reliable instant messengers in the world and when something goes wrong, people notice and people talk. It shows you when a user is online but is perhaps just choosing to ignore you.

Unsurprisingly, most, if not all of the blame was directed at Mark Zuckerburg, founder and CEO of Facebook. Twitter alone went crazy with the hashtag #WhatsAppdown. Some brands like Durex Kenya capitalized on the WhatsApp problems by doing some smart marketing which gained them kudos worldwide.

 

The WhatsApp status about server issues was probably the most retweeted under #WhatsAppdown on Saturday night with over 27K. Was it a test to see just how much clout WhatsApp has on its users? Could Facebook be trying to verify that their $16 billion acquisition was worth it? On the other hand, going by WhatsApp Status‘ previous tweets, WhatsApp outages have happened before. It actually seems like an outage occurs every month! So, the big fiasco could either be a reaction to the Facebook acquisition news or proof that the messenger has become a huge part of its users’ lives.

 Whatever the reason was, WhatsApp is back up and running and the world is happier than it was a 2 days ago.

Featured Image credit: Technology Zimbabwe