>WhatsApp's "secret" weapon for getting such great scalability for so cheap was choosing to use Erlang. WhatsApp's "secret" weapon for getting such great scala

>WhatsApp's "secret" weapon for getting such great scalability for so cheap was choosing to use Erlang. WhatsApp's "secret" weapon for getting such great scalability is the decade the founders spent at Yahoo building scalable systems, if I'm not mistaken. Give Erlang to someone else and they'll build a system that'll choke. The language is not the only part of the system. There was a sudden increase in the number of users, amplified by many Twitter account holders with huge audiences tweeting about moving to Signal. The system was designed with tradeoffs and assumptions. These assumptions changed and the system is unstable. They're likely trying to reach a steady state with a new set of assumptions and tradeoffs.