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Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
Many countries outside the US rely on WhatsApp for communication. I imagine even a few hours of non-communication wouldn’t be good for the economy or emergency services.
- junon 5y agoThe sad thought crossed my mind: people using Whatsapp to have last calls with family members dying of e.g. COVID, trying terribly to get onto telegram or something but having no luck getting through since everything was degraded. Kinda ruined the few hours of fun for me.
- jack_pp 5y agoI seriously doubt those people couldn't just call normally instead
- tehjoker 5y agoInternational calls might be too expensive unfortunately. The phone call might be right before ventilation rather than last words too.
- maw 5y agoIn many circumstances, WhatsApp works better -- like, a lot better -- than normal calls. Also it's often subsidized. They probably could have paid extra money out of pocket to call normally and get a substandard experience.
- itake 5y agoNormal telecom services do not offer free international calls or video conferencing like WhatsApp. You also would need a sim card and phone plan. WhatsApp just requires wifi.
- elzbardico 5y agoPeople dying of COVID are usually heavily sedated with a tube down their tracheae. They don’t have last words, they either get better or die.
- ahurmazda 5y agoAssuming you have never faced the above situation (and I pray you don't). It goes something like this: 1. on call nurse txts "its time" 2. you confirm that he/she will initiate a call in 20 mins over whatsapp/viber/messenger 3. The nurse holds up the ipad over your loved one's face 4.
- glouwbug 5y agoThat's heartbreaking
- queuebert 5y agoIn fact, they often have terribly ordinary last words, i.e. whatever they said immediately prior to what they thought was a temporary intubation.
- Aaronstotle 5y agoI imagine that developing countries were affected the worse, although that particular scenario is sad, I can't help but think of all the lost revenue that families/small businesses suffered because this outage.
- grahamannett 5y agoAll of us because thats all anyone talked about today
- HatchedLake721 5y ago64828274
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- elzbardico 5y agoAt 95% IC [24887443 to 127347009]
- nxbp 5y agoIf your life gets negatively affected by whatsapp being unavailable, order a new life instead. At least install Signal, Telegram et al and wean everyone else out of fb-wa.
- shwoopdiwoop 5y agoYou really were unable to come up with a single example of how this outage could have impacted people’s lives in drastic ways? I invite you to see life through other people’s eyes every once in a while. I promise it’ll be worth it.
- nxbp 5y agoDoesn't matter in this case. If you use fb's platform in any way, deal with it - especially if that's the only straw in use. People really should have other means and platforms to use and gravitate toward them. There is no good reason to prefer fb for anything.
- kazinator 5y agoIt would be pretty irresponsible for emergency services to be dependent on WhatsApp or anything of its ilk.
- pedrogrande 5y agoIn some countries, you can run out of mobile minutes or data but be on a plan that provides free access to Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram.
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- cotton-cho 5y agoFew weeks ago I had to reach the Westjet Customer support team for some help with my itinerary, after waiting on hold for over three hours and without any call back the only way I was able to reach an agent was via WhatsApp as they seem to have a higher response time over there. Three days later I received a call from an agent mentioning that he is returning a call... If it was not for Whatsapp I would have missed my flight as they wouldn't be able to make those changes.
- rubyist5eva 5y agoif whatsapp being down for a few hours negatively affects your life...time to get a backup plan
- simonw 5y agoApparently it's widely used within the UK NHS to schedule nursing rotas and suchlike: https://twitter.com/fourhourtarget/status/1445123106876571656 https://twitter.com/fourhourtarget/status/144512310687657165...
- edge17 5y agoI think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west. At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billions to invest in robust, secure IT infrastructure.
- jhugo 5y agoI live in a country where WhatsApp is heavily used for all sorts of things (business communication, personal communication, ordering food from local restaurants, and so on). I was actually surprised by how utterly replaceable it proved to be during this outage. I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least two or three messenger apps installed anyway, and since most work by the phone number, it's pretty seamless to switch to another.
- sidereturn 5y agoI find phone number systems difficult as I use a classic phone. FB messenger seems to be broken in browser on Android too. So ironically this is hard for me. I had to jump hoops getting signal onto an android. So I am stuck in email. Once xmmp felt usable.
- OneLeggedCat 5y agoIn your country, which messenger did most of you default to?
- jhugo 5y agoThere's a local one which a lot of people already have installed even if they don't use it most of the time. A lot of people have Telegram installed too. WhatsApp / FB Messenger are the most popular but if they're down, between those two you would have most people covered.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
- porknubbins 5y agoSlightly offtopic but my ISP has been having issues all over the country, I’ve been down 8 hrs. From the few people who could get customer service they aren’t admitting to any large scale outage either just following the usual “reset your device” script which is suspicious.
- TedShiller 5y agonone probably
- devit 5y agoWhatsapp contacts are phone numbers, so you can just call or text them with the phone network instead if it's essential.
- edoceo 5y agoExpensive from ZAF to USA tho. Fall back to email was our route.
- pedrogrande 5y agoIn many countries people rely on prepaid minutes and data and these plans usually come with free access to FB, Insta and Whatsapp. If their minutes run out they could normally still use Whatsapp
- aaron695 5y agoIt's a really interesting question. Some people will die early, some people will live longer because of it. Often with infrequent outages people will ramp up to fix the issue. So a shorter lunch and physically call people, which is mentally ok because you see it as important (compared to many shorter lunches which will reduce life span) Lets say Facebook and Co saves 100,000 lives a year, then 4 hour outage = 45 lives. With the increase in short term productivity, maybe you'd halve it. 20 lives lost? I think 100,00 lives (10,000,000 human years) a year saved by Facebook is reasonable. Maybe you could times that by 10, 100? It could be a very significant factor on the planet. I doubt Facebook would be negative. Does "Woke" and "Fake News" hurt more than Facebook helps, I find it unlikely. I think the greater question is how many lives are saved by Facebook each year. It's very complex. When a market place (like literally Facebook Marketplace) temporarily goes down how much money/assets are actually lost, lost. A human life is worth around $300,000 to $3 million depending on location, that's somewhat fungible in the location.
- screye 5y agoI use whatsapp for ALL my communication, and I got an incredible number of missed calls from family across the ocean because I wasn't answering. Nothing important, but my parents sure lost some sleep.
- periphrasis 5y agoSome number less than their active user count? Ask a leading question; get a flippant answer. I’d find the cries for empathy to the poor affected users more compelling if it weren’t for the fact that anyone of working age can remember a time when these technologies didn’t exist. If it’s a tragedy that you didn’t have access to a novel technology for six hours, then I’d question the health of your relationship to it, and the wisdom of any economic choices you’ve made which depend upon it.
- chimpansteve 5y agoI can remember a time when the internet wasn't widely available, and I'm not that old. Are you saying that everyone should just go back to how things were done in 1990, and the only impact would be the fault of the people using it?
- periphrasis 5y agoI’m saying that anyone that thinks that progress is a given and that we are inherently better off for having the social web may not be giving sufficient considerations to the trade offs we have incurred. On the other hand I’m typing in anger, so I might just be an asshole.
- pedrogrande 5y agoWow! Snarky much? Do you have any experience living in a country outside a "first world" country? Do you have any understanding how these "novel" technologies can be the backbone of people's business, livelihoods or even emergency services? Sounds like you are in a comfortable bubble.
- periphrasis 5y agoNo I do not. And I’m sorry that the incumbent monopolist in third world countries is such a shit show that anyone has to suffer for their incompetence. Doesn’t change the reality that Facebook is the only game in town in the developing world because they worked very hard to make it that way. Tell you what: I’ll be more empathetic to victims of the great Facebook outage of 2021 if you can be more empathetic to the mother I lost to covid after refusing to get vaccinated on account of memes she saw on Facebook. Deal?
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- replink 5y agoI live in SEA where everyone uses Whatsapp and the company I work for caters to SMEs. My own experience was that the impact was small. We saw some influx on Telegram, a lot more people called in, or reached out to us via Intercom. The end result of WA going down was people switching over to Telegram or Signal, including myself. I think if WA shut off permanently tomorrow there'd be a fair bit of disruption, but it wouldn't take too much time or impact for people to end up settling on another messaging app or platform. The SMEs we work with didn't seem concerned.
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- na85 5y agoMy first world problems were greatly exacerbated by Whatsapp being down. I could not communicate with my in-laws via WhatsApp which meant I actually had to speak to them in person.
- freedom2099 5y agoI did not even realise it was down till it was over… I ignore my WhatsApp messages for as long as I can usually!
- WelcomeShorty 5y agoI am sure I am one of the few who's live is so unimportant that I can be offline for a day without anyone panicking / loosing lucrative deals / missing once in a live time opportunities, but boy do I feel blessed. The time I needed to be available as badly as most of you seem today, I carried at least 2 phones, from 2 different providers from 2 different countries and was instructed how to get where in case of a (comms) blackout. Glad that's over for me, hope you guys are all well.