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WhatsApp goes down for users globally
- detaro 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33327320
- jansan 4y agoThat one should be on the front page.
- detaro 4y agoyeah, but people just can't be bothered to check if maybe the big thing that happened in the last 30 minutes could possibly have been submitted already before posting submission number 10 about it, so that's what happens.
- edf13 4y agoIt's not that they can't be bothered - it's that they want to be the one that posts with the upvotes/attention
- throwawayben 4y agoI don't understand why it's not given recency + votes
- astorsnk 4y agoDisagree completely. I’d much rather have a link to a trustworthy source than a random person writing “Tell HN: WhatsApp is down”. The post you think should be frontpage is useless imo. Take the time to link to a source instead of trying to beat everyone to the punch to get a little karma.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mothsonasloth 4y ago[flagged]
- 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"
- miroljub 4y agoI supposed it's a Matrix client, but couldn't find anything by glancing the home page. Btw, the whole idea of "no phone numbers" makes it really hard to spread. It basically means you can't send a message to anyone in your address book that already has Session installed, unless you get his Session username by other means.
- verisimi 4y ago"Convenience, not privacy!"
- iamreallytired 4y agoThat's a good thing. Forcing people to give their phone number to use an instant messaging app/protocol is a sign the company just wants your private data. Also, by doing that and letting the account existence be publicly known, anyone with their phone number will know that they have an account on that service and lets you try to contact them. That can range from privacy violation to life-in-danger situations.
- blippage 4y agoI adamantly refuse to register for accounts that require my phone number unless it's for commercial or official purposes. The likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft can go take a long walk off a short plank. We give too much information away. Companies have shown that they are incapable of keeping the information private anyway. We get big scandals, the interwebs kick up a big stink, brows are furrowed, and then we go back to doing what we did before with nobody learning anything.
- klpu 4y ago[flagged]
- seydor 4y agoThankfully there is still email, which never went down globally
- kaptainscarlet 4y agoEmail is slowly becoming centralised unfortunately as small providers are pushed out by big companies. So it won't be long until we have global email outages.
- euroderf 4y agoHam radio operators practice disaster ops, don't they ? How about indie email providers ?
- Arch-TK 4y agoWe practice giving up on the whole ordeal as we have to send another damn email to Microsoft asking for them to investigate their standards-non-compliant black box email filtering systems which even they don't understand.
- Aachen 4y agoStubborn self hoster reporting for duty
- j3th9n 4y agosame
- mcluck 4y agoI tried to go the self-hosted route. It became impossible to manage. I don't know how many hours I sunk in to figuring out why, seemingly randomly, my emails were being marked as spam by Google. If you can't get through to Google, you're effectively invisible for most people
- kaptainscarlet 4y ago
- saivamsisuru99 4y agoright may be the server down or maintenance..all over the globe issue is raising
- sgt 4y agoMaybe they needed to restart BEAM.
- skc 4y agoYep, actually enjoying the lack of notifications right now. Though for my closest friends and family we still have Signal as backup.
- Aachen 4y ago> actually enjoying the lack of notifications Sounds like a nice way to test new notification settings before putting them into production. Now go and apply them ;)
- sgt 4y agoTake my advice - switch off notifications. You'll still see the badge on the app itself e.g. with a red dot, at least that's how it is on iOS. So when you see that you'll know to open it. Before that, there's no reason to be bothered while you're doing something else.
- sneak 4y agoYou mean switch off banners - if you switch off notifications entirely, the badge will not update as the app will not wake up in the background to fetch new messages when they come in.
- sgt 4y agoYou are right, thanks for pointing out.
- k8sToGo 4y agoOr just use Focus on iOS. You can then even select to whitelist certain people.
- dncornholio 4y agoMute your groups!
- vardump 4y agoWorks again now, at about 08:46 UTC.
- jiggywiggy 4y agoStill not Fully
- dividebyhero 4y agoWorks for me with VPN but not without
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quados 4y agoSeems to work on desktop, doesn’t sync with mobile though
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chagaif 4y agoTime to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...
- sofixa 4y agoWhy not Telegram, it has by far the best UX of all chat apps.
- mritzmann 4y agoTelegram (per default) does not have end-to-end encryption.
- d0mine 4y ago"Telegram is more secure than mass market messengers like WhatsApp and Line." https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-secure-is-telegram https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-secure-is-telegram
- devX3 4y agoposts "fact" about product of company factual statement is made by said company doesn't elaborate gigachad.jpg
- londons_explore 4y agoI don't agree with that claim. While there is no e2e encryption, the number of people that can see the chats between me and my mother has just gone from two (me and her) to 500 (all the engineers on the telegram team). Also, being based in the UAE doesn't inspire confidence on the privacy and security front... Nor the fact they promised to release yearly transparency reports and then never did so... Or the fact Der Spiegel claims they have evidence of Telegram handing over user chats to authorities despite the fact telegrams FAQ claims they have never done so...
- bombolo 4y ago
- taspeotis 4y agoI don’t think there’s a status page for WhatsApp, but Meta has this for the business side of things: https://metastatus.com/whatsapp-business-api https://metastatus.com/whatsapp-business-api
- perryizgr8 4y agoLol why does that page return 404 with actual content?
- abluecloud 4y agoit's the geniuses way of not getting a page indexed.... shrug
- jakopo87 4y agoIt does exist a twitter[0] account not updated since 2014 that has, ironically, in its bio: "We are working very hard to make this twitter account irrelevant." [0] https://nitter.net/wa_status https://nitter.net/wa_status
- Synaesthesia 4y agoIt's back for me personally in South Africa.
- dustedcodes 4y agoEven though I do have WhatsApp I wouldn't have noticed without this HN headline. Everyone I message with is via iMessage or Signal nowadays and I only have WhatsApp because I am part of a few sports clubs which have a WhatsApp group but we don't chat enough for me to notice a downtime like today. Makes me happy to see how I've actually managed to rid myself of WhatsApp for the most part.
- sgt 4y agoSame, I use iMessage for anything critical as friends and family are mostly on iPhones, but for those that aren't I use WhatsApp and Telegram. In some countries WhatsApp is used by almost everyone. I wonder how much all those free users cost Meta each year. Just as a side thought :)
- themoonisachees 4y agothese free users are probably generating revenue by sharing all their conversations to advertisers.
- sneak 4y agoWhatsApp is end to end encrypted and AFAIK now has encrypted backups. iMessage intentionally preserves a backdoor in its crypto so that the FBI can read approximately every iMessage sent/received without a warrant, should they so desire.
- eye_street 4y agoWould you mind expanding on that last bit? It’s this related to iCloud backups, the ability to add an invisible user to a chat, or something else?
- capableweb 4y agoBoth whatsapp and imessage are run by american companies, you can sure both of them are compromised and I wouldn't pass US state secrets via either of them. For the normal person this matters less of course, intelligence services are not interested in your nudes.
- sMarsIntruder 4y agoThat's why centralization is bad, especially for now-become critical services such as WA.
- sgt 4y agoThe world can go a few hours without WhatsApp. If it's that important, just pick up the phone.
- esperent 4y agoI don't know the phone numbers of anyone except my mother and my bank.
- sneak 4y agoIt is not presently possible to make PSTN phone calls to several of the people in warzones with whom I use WhatsApp to communicate. IP networks have much more reach than the PSTN these days. It's not 1995.
- sgt 4y agoOut of interest, is Ukraine one of the war zones?
- WA 4y agoLet’s do a phone group call with 50 people, fun.
- thinkpapi_W541 4y ago
- smithcoin 4y agoCoincidental timing for me- anecdotally I noticed a few WhatsApp commercials during the Monday Night Football game last evening. Meta was hyping up how its end to end encrypted. That’s the first time I have seen national tv adverting for WhatsApp. There also were commercials for Meta’s new headsets so maybe it was part of a larger spend.
- jve 4y agoWife just received account registration sms that new device has been registered. Anyone else experiencing that? Error? Worse?
- irjustin 4y agoi haven't seen this yet but will definitely be keeping an eye out.
- jve 4y agoI sent a support question. Anyway, Google doesn't return any concerning info. It could be just kids... but I asked and with 90% probability, those ain't kids :) EDIT: Support answered with generic mail on what to do if problems registering device... eh, whatever.
- jve 4y agoEDIT2: Hey, now I received new device registration code! (after 1,5hrs) Still no-one receiving these messages?
- Nextgrid 4y agoI wonder if it's a scam and scammers are just taking advantage of the general panic surrounding the outage?
- light_hearted 4y ago[flagged]
- shrikant 4y agoI downvoted and flagged this comment, because it's a brand new account shilling a shady-looking binary from a shady-looking website. Would strongly recommend that people not bother with this spammy nonsense, and indeed downvote and flag away as well.
- capableweb 4y agoThat sounds like a really sketchy version of whatsapp that I wouldn't use if I were you. > Most of the time while using the official WhatsApp app, you can get banned maybe because of some issues going on with your mobile number. With the use of GB WhatsApp, such a ban isn’t available. You will absolutely be off the banning problems while using Gb WhatsApp Download the 2023 New Version So, basically Whatsapp can ban you but you can still use Whatsapp? Hard doubt. Sounds like it's not actually Whatsapp at all and they are sitting in the middle.
- zapdrive 4y agoPlease think carefully before downloading this APK. Could be a virus, Trojan, or just simply read all your WhatsApp convos.
- jdlyga 4y agoI'm amazed people still use WhatsApp. We mostly abandoned it in the United States back in the mid 2010's. I mostly use it with friends over in european countries, just like I do with people in China with WeChat.
- jmcnulty 4y agoLike most of your replies, the UK is the same. Its everywhere here.
- coolca 4y agoHow do you message with non iPhone users? SMS is very limited in function.
- galleywest200 4y agoSignal, Telegram, Discord, etc. Tons of options besides iMessage.
- petesergeant 4y agoHere in Dubai, life runs on WhatsApp.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- haolez 4y agoIn Brazil, not using WhatsApp can be considered an anti-social stance at this point. My business partners would think that I'm a weird person.
- sergiomattei 4y agoLatin America runs on WhatsApp
- stoeckley 4y agoAs do many other countries. You really cannot live without it in much of the world.