10 ms·
Tell HN: WhatsApp Is Down
- dlqx 4y agoWhat's the big issue here? Can't people remain in silence for a few hours without their usual communication. Are we so dependent on these tools? If there is something really urgent I don't think people would use WhatsApp in the first place, or when did you text with 911 the last time using WhatsApp? Maybe we got even more productive and thoughtful during these cutt-off hours. Hours without notification, chit-chat and that social background hum we so much used to be in doesn't sound that bad, does it?
- labarilem 4y agoConfirmed in Italy
- senttoschool 4y agoconfirmed
- dimastopel 4y agoYes, https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/ https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/
- yla92 4y agoConfirmed (I'm at UTC+8, SEA)
- talhof8 4y agoConfirmed in Israel
- Raed667 4y agoThe web interface loads but is unable to connect. The Android app shows messages with the clock icon (unable to send).
- tiernano 4y agoHmmm... thought it was me. Based on ireland.
- rcarmo 4y agoYeah, down here in Portugal too. Even the local voluntary emergency responders reacted: https://twitter.com/vostpt/status/1584812996945383425 https://twitter.com/vostpt/status/1584812996945383425
- FrankSansC 4y agoSeems like a worldwide outage
- jansan 4y agoThis is a big issue in Europe. Everyone I know does text communication exclusively through WhatApp.
- donkeyd 4y agoThey can still text regularly though, so it isn't that much of an issue if there's a real need to communicate. Edit: I feel like every response I'm getting is: 'but texting is expensive, especially with foreign contacts'. Sure, but do you really need to send 100 texts in the odd hour that Whatsapp is offline sometimes, or can they wait? Parent wrote 'This is a big issue in Europe', which is what I'm responding to. I live in Europe, I have foreign contacts. This should not be a big issue, because for pretty much everything that can't wait, texting or calling will be worth it. If it isn't worth spending some money to get in touch with someone, it can probably wait. This may be an actual issue for a very, very small number of people. But the majority is just exaggerating because they feel disconnected without being able to send Gifs to their friends for an hour.
- sneak 4y agoMany people using WhatsApp are only using IP networks and can't send/receive SMS. There's a war on, right now, for example.
- savolai 4y agoThe bigger issue is groups, who may not all be in your contacts, as well as services relying on whatsapp as infrastructure.
- donkeyd 4y agoI have groups like that. If I open the app now, I can still see all their phone numbers, in case I really need to reach someone urgently.
- mooncakes_ooohh 4y agoSitting in Africa and I have clients in Europe - some things just don't lend themselves to email coms.
- mattbee 4y agoYep, I came to /new to check as soon as my messages didn't send immediately :)
- leodriesch 4y agoDown in Germany as well.
- viron 4y agoHere too, in Afg.
- pelario 4y agoSeems global outage: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.ht... Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
- arcanemachiner 4y agoIs this not just another centralized point of failure?
- berkes 4y agoI'm presuming GP does not put Signal forward as a solution to outages. But instead uses the opportunity to talk about messengers and show that there are alternatives in general. At least, that is what I do.
- teekert 4y agoYes it's what I do, and then I actively struggle to hold back on pushing Matrix/Element as the solution. The beauty of the federated system, it's the way the internet was intended to function, oh man I love talking about it. But, nobody unaware of Signal will ever run their own Matrix server of course. Signal is simple, recognizable, very much like WA. A WA outage is indeed a good point in time to have a lighthearted conversation about messengers and platforms. A lot of people still don't realize Meta owns WA. What I like is that the normy friends I have on Signal are now telling all their normy friends/colleagues about Signal and how we are still apping away while WA is down.
- the_duke 4y agoSignal is just another centralised architecture. You should recruit people to Matrix , which supports Federation.
- theelous3 4y agoYep. I host my own server and have it federated. That part was simple. It was a struggle to get my core group of friends to sign up, and I just sort of haven't bothered trying to get anyone outside that group to try it. They are not technical people in the hn sense but are vastly more competent than the average joe. It's the normies at large who dictate comms platforms really. Things like matching emoji support and easy + performant video and picture sharing are absolutely crucial.
- codetrotter 4y agoYeah, same here in my current location Spain. I was trying to send a message to wish good morning to the girl that I’m seeing, and WhatsApp was stuck on “connecting”. https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/ https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/ confirms that many other users are currently having problems connecting too. Does WhatsApp have any official status page? I found an old twitter account that appears to be official but it hasn’t posted in ages. Will they write post mortem analysis somewhere?
- thijsr 4y agoThey have a status page for the WhatsApp Business API at https://metastatus.com/whatsapp-business-api https://metastatus.com/whatsapp-business-api It currently shows major disruptions.
- t0tal 4y agoDown in Uganda too. I was speaking to my cousin who just had a baby and told her I'd call back in 2 minutes to see the kid and then whatsapp went down!
- literalAardvark 4y ago
- tyho 4y agoUK Government shuts down
- sho 4y agoSo no change then
- ksec 4y agoWhatsApp seems to have more problems once they switched over to Facebook’s platform rather than their good old fashion FreeBSD with big servers.
- staindk 4y agoInterestingly, a couple minutes before WA went down my messages were being sent while only displaying a single tick (as in the other parties could see my single-tick messages). Thought it was quite weird/concerning that that could happen.
- arafsheikh 4y agoTypical case of degraded mode of operation, I presume. That’s how well engineered systems should behave when they’re about to go down. My guess is that this particular outage was caused due to a scaling constraint somewhere in the stack.
- vsnf 4y agoThere are many ways systems can fail. Do you really feel as confident about your guess as your statement implies?
- arafsheikh 4y agoIt was just a guess :) Would be interesting to see the RCA if/when it’s published.
- beardyw 4y agoSeems politicians will need to use official channels.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoMy team just decided to use whatsapp in case of incidents, lmao
- 7373737373 4y agotime to bust out the good old ham radio
- lionkor 4y agoSounds like youd maybe want to consider a platform with a lower downtime requirement - isnt sms/phone at like 5min/yr downtime (99.999% up) or whatever?
- vijaykodam 4y agoThis is the time when people search for alternate messaging apps like Signal, Telegram :) Totally forgot that I have installed both those apps and opened them today after more than a year.
- pmontra 4y agoI sent a couple of WA to a friend, noticed the clock icon, didn't think about it until when I saw these news one hour later. If I really had to hear from her I'd call her or at least send her a SMS (maybe the first one of the year, to anybody.) Same thing if she were one of those friends I'm using Telegram to chat with. I assume that most of them have both WA and Telegram, WA for sure.
- palata 4y agoIs it also the time to remind about the fact that Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted? I mean, the "secret chats" are end-to-end encrypted, but if you use Telegram that's the last thing you want to use. If you use Telegram with only the secret chats, then Signal is better. If you use all the cool features of Telegram, then your communications are not end-to-end encrypted (i.e. the Telegram server and whoever can hack them can read everything).
- graup 4y agoLast week, KakaoTalk (the main messenger used in Korea) was down FOR A WHOLE DAY because of a fire in their (1!) data center. Let's see how long it takes WhatsApp to get back online.
- KoftaBob 4y agoSeems like a good time to plug Session: https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ Open source, doesn't require a phone number, and a big strength is that it's decentralized, which makes it much less vulnerable to outages like this. "Session utilises the decentralised Oxen Service Node Network to store and route messages. This means that unlike P2P messaging applications you can message Session users when they are offline. This network consists of community operated nodes which are stationed all over the world. Service nodes are organised into collections of small co-operative groups called swarms. Swarms offer additional redundancy and message delivery guarantees even if some service nodes become unreachable. By using this network, Session doesn’t have a central point of failure, and Session’s creators have no capacity to collect or store personal information about people using the app"
- schnitzelstoat 4y agoIn Europe it's used a lot by small businesses etc. it's pretty bad if it's not reliable. The metaverse better be real good, else Meta will be in serious decline.
- masklinn 4y ago> The metaverse better be real good They’ve invented legs, I’m not sure what else you’d need.
- shaan7 4y agoWings, obviously.
- netsharc 4y agoI feel like people don't see the timeline. As much as I hate Zuck, his current 3D playground is probably comparable to a 70's video game, and his vision is that the Metaverse future is Skyrim or GTA5, I guess that'd be a Matrix-like virtual world. Imagine a headset with a 360 degree camera, so you can broadcast your surroundings, and someone else can wear their VR headset and be seeing what your camera is seeing. Or use some transformation/extra gear so they can view the world/your avatar from a few feet next to you.
- RNAlfons 4y agoSounds terribly stupid to me. This technology needs drastic minimization to become seriously popular.
- vardump 4y agoAnd now it works again, about 08:46 UTC.
- RugnirViking 4y agoStill having issues here, unfortunately
- vardump 4y agoI hope it'll work for you soon. Just tried WA again, the messages are definitely being sent & received.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tintedfireglass 4y agowhatsapp still down in india
- dividebyhero 4y agoWorks for me with VPN but not without
- Razengan 4y agoGlobal communication protocols and interfaces should be left to the ISPs, just like email and NNTP etc. used to be, and DNS still is. Really, why can't everything be like DNS? You ask the nearest available authority about something, and that in turn asks the next nearest authority, until that shit is found. Would work for web search too. When you need a pretty UI just put different client apps on top of it, just like we did/do for email and newsgroups.
- tannhaeuser 4y agoThey're ruining DNS, too, in the form of DNS-over-HTTP. The justification being that DNS is tampered with by national NICs (eg a paragon of press freedom such as ycombinator.com redirected to something else). Of course, DoH has absolutely nothing to do with valuable DNS query data and closing "leaks" of visit data from Google's PoV ...
- danpalmer 4y agoIn my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.
- gnyman 4y agoI was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ... https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watching. Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?
- bob1029 4y ago> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate. Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999. Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
- mozman 4y ago> Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Complexity comes from hiring. Nobody wants to work on old reliable tech because it’s boring and uncommon.
- 4y ago
- spookyuser 4y agoI feel like iMessage is also being weird
- deafpolygon 4y agoI just remembered iMessage exists.
- chagaif 4y agoTime to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
- ppipada 4y agoAnything to do with the unusually large message and photo spike of Diwali messages globally? Mine got delivered though
- angry_octet 4y agoIt seems bizarre to me that Europeans have to pay for sending international SMS, it's been free/unlimited in many places for 5 years. Will carriers charge for RCS? How has Google got them to sign up without some fee?
- mcjiggerlog 4y agoIf you think people use Whatsapp just because of international SMS pricing then you don't really understand Whatsapp.
- angry_octet 4y agoBut that's literally what people (on HN) are saying is the reason why people can't fall back to SMS.