9 ms·

WhatsApp Down

105 points by Avlin67 3y ago

conformist 3y ago
The WhatsApp messenger seems to be working, however.
Avlin67 3y ago
maybe dns ?
- Halfwhit 3y ago
  It's always DNS
- fuzzylightbulb 3y ago
  https://isitdns.com/ https://isitdns.com/
EGreg 3y ago
They’re wrong, I am using it now. Yes WhatsApp.com is wrong about the status of their own messenger hehe
- ddalex 3y ago
  At least the web gateway is down. Not sure about phones that were already connected. Perhaps a DNS issue - error is DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN ?
  - toast0 3y ago
    If it's just DNS, as it seems to be from my perspective, that's likely to break the gateway for browsers, but it doesn't mean the gateway is down; just hard to access. The phone client is resilient to DNS failures, but it's hard to do that for a website used by a browser (I'm not really sure how it would be done, probably something with service workers which can intercept and process outgoing requests?); and impossible to do if you hadn't loaded it previously. Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019, including on resilience to DNS failures.
    - ddalex 3y ago
      I'm using the downloadable app though, you can do IP pinning in there too, but seems nobody bothered to do it. Now I wish I had somewhere a history of DNS entries. Edit: there appears to be historical DNS records on the internet, so pinning a known IP in /etc/hosts make things work
      - toast0 3y ago
        Yeah, it's possible to have IP fallbacks in the downloadable app, but if it's not working, it's likely it wasn't done (although I'm not in a place to check if the web gateway is currently working; it's possible two things are broken at the same time) Looks like it's back now (or in progress to back anyway), but if you want to mess around with your hosts file, and you don't mind a bit of spelunking, you can find your suggested facebook IP with host www.facebook.com, and then look around in the /24 of that IP, looking for whatsapp-cdn-... in reverse DNS. That IP should respond well to requests for web.whatsapp.com. You might need to do something for the websocket hostname(s) too, but I forget the details of that. Might work going to the same IP. Take a look at domains used now, in case you want to do this again in the future.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  whatsapp.com, wa.me, etc are not responding
lopatin 3y ago
Looks like they took Erlang's "let it fail" philosophy literally.
madacol 3y ago
DNS of whatsapp.com is down. The app works fine
- kro 3y ago
  dig +trace reveals that only some of the nameservers don't respond (on IPv4, but got a fine response after trying an IPv6). ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.48.12#53: timed out whatsapp.com. 60 IN A 157.240.223.60 ;; Received 57 bytes from 2620:13e:100d:c::35#53(d.ns.whatsapp.net) in 119 ms Especially a.ns.whatsapp.net still seems down (IPv6 also). I wonder whether this could be a BGP thing again, it was modified very recently according to [1] but I don't understand too much about that. [1] https://lg.twelve99.net/?type=bgp&router=bei-b2&address=66.111.48.12 https://lg.twelve99.net/?type=bgp&router=bei-b2&address=66.1...
  - toast0 3y ago
    I didn't get the sense of a BGP error, mtr to ipv4 [a-d].ns.whatsapp.net looked ok enough during the outage. I even got back responses from d.ns.whatsapp.net to mtr probes while not getting DNS responses. Although, now that DNS is working, the mtrs are pretty different, I'm not used to getting such wide geographical response.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  It's always DNS.
- XCSme 3y ago
  So is the conclusions: use IPs? Or how can you protect your app against those outages?
  - toast0 3y ago
    Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. We built in resilience against DNS failing because there's a lot of networks in the world, and some of them don't have consistently working DNS. Turns out it also helps a lot when someone hijacks your domain account (grr), or DDoSes your DNS provider (on my birthday too, grr), or you mess up DNS somehow (nobody was willing to tell me what happened yesterday, grr). Doesn't help much with BGP based outages though. The trick is if you bake IPs into your client packages, you need to have most or at least some of those IPs still working until the packages expire, and you need to have a process for server teams and client teams to update the lists for future releases as well as for server teams to know what's in the client builds in the wild. That's not too hard if you're running in bare metal hosting and your hosts are long lived. It's harder if you're running ephemeral cloud stuff (but there's ways to reserve IPs, so it's not _that_ hard). There's some additional difficulty if you're only running ipv4 servers and some of your clients only have NAT64 access to ipv4. But, it's 2023, you can and probably should make ipv6 work on your servers.
DANmode 3y ago
If you're here, reading this, and using WhatsApp for any Operations channel of any kind: what are you doing?
- nsriv 3y ago
  I've seen major airport operations in India run off of WhatsApp groupchats and forwards between chats. People will gravitate to what they know lol.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    Oh, that's is terrifying. How is there any oversight into an operation running on WhatsApp?
    - davchana 3y ago
      In India, anybody can get a business account, which allows you to setup a catalogue of things, services, and you can pay inside app through underlying UPI interface (government operated quick guaranteed no-return money transfer). I have booked cars for rental, I have bought grocery, pizza, shoes n stuff.
      - elforce002 3y ago
        That's crazy. I'd never use something like that to order anything but each their own I suppose...
        mousetree 3y ago
        You're not going to like WeChat then either
        sharadov 3y ago
        You don't have a choice - in India it's as ubiquitous as paypal is here.
    - 3y ago
davidkuennen 3y ago
Did META just kill off WhatsApp during the Apple presentation when Apple is presenting their own VR solution? Or am I reading too much into this?
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  What would killing WhatsApp achieve in relation to that?
  - davidkuennen 3y ago
    I guess you're right. Not much.
- bryancoxwell 3y ago
  This isn’t remotely relevant
8ivek 3y ago
[dead]
renewiltord 3y ago
Both web.whatsapp.com and the messenger are working for me.
olddustytrail 3y ago
Well, you know what they say: What's goes App must go Down!
lom 3y ago
works fine here
revskill 3y ago
Sorry, what's app down ?
pul 3y ago
Whatsapp's DNS records are back up now: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records/ https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records...
jdlyga 3y ago
[flagged]
- qorrect 3y ago
  And Latam
- spookie 3y ago
  Telegram? In my experience, European countries seem to use it alot
  - theaudacityofyw 3y ago
    Mostly Eastern European countries. Some fringe far right groups in Western Europe use Telegram because of a percieved higher level of privacy. If WhatsApp went down for any considerable length of time, countries like Spain would fall apart. I do recall an outage of several hours a couple years back that contributed to a huge spike in Telegram and Signal installs. Then, sadly it went back up and everyone just went back to WhatsApp.
    - spookie 3y ago
      I'm not in either of those groups you described, thankfully not in the latter! Maybe it's just due to me being a techy. Nonetheless, the move you described, even if short lived, shows that the effects aren't as dire as one may imagine.
- vidarh 3y ago
  2bn monthly active users is rather a bit more than "Europeans".
- mattl 3y ago
  Having a group chat with a mix of iOS and Android is painful on anything other than WhatsApp.
baud147258 3y ago
It happened just as I was connecting my new phone to Whatsapp. Made for a few worrying moments where I was wondering if I had made a mistake somewhere and got myself locked out of my account...
bwb 3y ago
Lasted 2 hours in some places https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp
fortuna86 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
StingyJelly 3y ago
Never let a good crisis go to waste. I got a family member to install Signal!

WhatsApp Down

105 points by Avlin67 3y ago

conformist 3y ago

The WhatsApp messenger seems to be working, however.

Avlin67 3y ago

maybe dns ?

Halfwhit 3y ago
It's always DNS
fuzzylightbulb 3y ago
https://isitdns.com/ https://isitdns.com/

EGreg 3y ago

They’re wrong, I am using it now. Yes WhatsApp.com is wrong about the status of their own messenger hehe

ddalex 3y ago
At least the web gateway is down. Not sure about phones that were already connected. Perhaps a DNS issue - error is DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN ?
- toast0 3y ago
  If it's just DNS, as it seems to be from my perspective, that's likely to break the gateway for browsers, but it doesn't mean the gateway is down; just hard to access. The phone client is resilient to DNS failures, but it's hard to do that for a website used by a browser (I'm not really sure how it would be done, probably something with service workers which can intercept and process outgoing requests?); and impossible to do if you hadn't loaded it previously. Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019, including on resilience to DNS failures.
  - ddalex 3y ago
    I'm using the downloadable app though, you can do IP pinning in there too, but seems nobody bothered to do it. Now I wish I had somewhere a history of DNS entries. Edit: there appears to be historical DNS records on the internet, so pinning a known IP in /etc/hosts make things work
    - toast0 3y ago
      Yeah, it's possible to have IP fallbacks in the downloadable app, but if it's not working, it's likely it wasn't done (although I'm not in a place to check if the web gateway is currently working; it's possible two things are broken at the same time) Looks like it's back now (or in progress to back anyway), but if you want to mess around with your hosts file, and you don't mind a bit of spelunking, you can find your suggested facebook IP with host www.facebook.com, and then look around in the /24 of that IP, looking for whatsapp-cdn-... in reverse DNS. That IP should respond well to requests for web.whatsapp.com. You might need to do something for the websocket hostname(s) too, but I forget the details of that. Might work going to the same IP. Take a look at domains used now, in case you want to do this again in the future.
TremendousJudge 3y ago
whatsapp.com, wa.me, etc are not responding

lopatin 3y ago

Looks like they took Erlang's "let it fail" philosophy literally.

madacol 3y ago

DNS of whatsapp.com is down. The app works fine

kro 3y ago
dig +trace reveals that only some of the nameservers don't respond (on IPv4, but got a fine response after trying an IPv6). ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out ;; communications error to 66.111.48.12#53: timed out whatsapp.com. 60 IN A 157.240.223.60 ;; Received 57 bytes from 2620:13e:100d:c::35#53(d.ns.whatsapp.net) in 119 ms Especially a.ns.whatsapp.net still seems down (IPv6 also). I wonder whether this could be a BGP thing again, it was modified very recently according to [1] but I don't understand too much about that. [1] https://lg.twelve99.net/?type=bgp&router=bei-b2&address=66.111.48.12 https://lg.twelve99.net/?type=bgp&router=bei-b2&address=66.1...
- toast0 3y ago
  I didn't get the sense of a BGP error, mtr to ipv4 [a-d].ns.whatsapp.net looked ok enough during the outage. I even got back responses from d.ns.whatsapp.net to mtr probes while not getting DNS responses. Although, now that DNS is working, the mtrs are pretty different, I'm not used to getting such wide geographical response.
paulddraper 3y ago
It's always DNS.
XCSme 3y ago
So is the conclusions: use IPs? Or how can you protect your app against those outages?
- toast0 3y ago
  Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. We built in resilience against DNS failing because there's a lot of networks in the world, and some of them don't have consistently working DNS. Turns out it also helps a lot when someone hijacks your domain account (grr), or DDoSes your DNS provider (on my birthday too, grr), or you mess up DNS somehow (nobody was willing to tell me what happened yesterday, grr). Doesn't help much with BGP based outages though. The trick is if you bake IPs into your client packages, you need to have most or at least some of those IPs still working until the packages expire, and you need to have a process for server teams and client teams to update the lists for future releases as well as for server teams to know what's in the client builds in the wild. That's not too hard if you're running in bare metal hosting and your hosts are long lived. It's harder if you're running ephemeral cloud stuff (but there's ways to reserve IPs, so it's not _that_ hard). There's some additional difficulty if you're only running ipv4 servers and some of your clients only have NAT64 access to ipv4. But, it's 2023, you can and probably should make ipv6 work on your servers.

DANmode 3y ago

If you're here, reading this, and using WhatsApp for any Operations channel of any kind: what are you doing?

nsriv 3y ago
I've seen major airport operations in India run off of WhatsApp groupchats and forwards between chats. People will gravitate to what they know lol.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Oh, that's is terrifying. How is there any oversight into an operation running on WhatsApp?
  - davchana 3y ago
    In India, anybody can get a business account, which allows you to setup a catalogue of things, services, and you can pay inside app through underlying UPI interface (government operated quick guaranteed no-return money transfer). I have booked cars for rental, I have bought grocery, pizza, shoes n stuff.
    - elforce002 3y ago
      That's crazy. I'd never use something like that to order anything but each their own I suppose...
      - mousetree 3y ago
        You're not going to like WeChat then either
      - sharadov 3y ago
        You don't have a choice - in India it's as ubiquitous as paypal is here.
  - 3y ago

davidkuennen 3y ago

Did META just kill off WhatsApp during the Apple presentation when Apple is presenting their own VR solution? Or am I reading too much into this?

whatyesaid 3y ago
What would killing WhatsApp achieve in relation to that?
- davidkuennen 3y ago
  I guess you're right. Not much.
bryancoxwell 3y ago
This isn’t remotely relevant

8ivek 3y ago

[dead]

renewiltord 3y ago

Both web.whatsapp.com and the messenger are working for me.

olddustytrail 3y ago

Well, you know what they say: What's goes App must go Down!

lom 3y ago

works fine here

revskill 3y ago

Sorry, what's app down ?

pul 3y ago

Whatsapp's DNS records are back up now: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records/ https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records...

jdlyga 3y ago

[flagged]

qorrect 3y ago
And Latam
spookie 3y ago
Telegram? In my experience, European countries seem to use it alot
- theaudacityofyw 3y ago
  Mostly Eastern European countries. Some fringe far right groups in Western Europe use Telegram because of a percieved higher level of privacy. If WhatsApp went down for any considerable length of time, countries like Spain would fall apart. I do recall an outage of several hours a couple years back that contributed to a huge spike in Telegram and Signal installs. Then, sadly it went back up and everyone just went back to WhatsApp.
  - spookie 3y ago
    I'm not in either of those groups you described, thankfully not in the latter! Maybe it's just due to me being a techy. Nonetheless, the move you described, even if short lived, shows that the effects aren't as dire as one may imagine.
vidarh 3y ago
2bn monthly active users is rather a bit more than "Europeans".
mattl 3y ago
Having a group chat with a mix of iOS and Android is painful on anything other than WhatsApp.

baud147258 3y ago

It happened just as I was connecting my new phone to Whatsapp. Made for a few worrying moments where I was wondering if I had made a mistake somewhere and got myself locked out of my account...

bwb 3y ago

Lasted 2 hours in some places https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp

fortuna86 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

StingyJelly 3y ago

Never let a good crisis go to waste. I got a family member to install Signal!