8 ms·
WhatsApp is down
- RockyMcNuts 13y agoInstalling those NSA back doors can be tricky.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- iancarroll 13y agoYet another it-must-be-the-NSA comment.
- gahahaha 13y agoThey are silly because the NSA obviously already had all the back doors they wanted. Nothing to do with Facebook.
- josu 13y agoNo need for backdoors, with WhatsApp's security measures sending a message is like broadcasting a tweet. EDIT: This is what I'm talking about http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/crypto-weaknesses-in-whatsapp-the-kind-of-stuff-the-nsa-would-love/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/crypto-weaknesses-in...
- level09 13y agoit's ironic I was just reading their papers about how they scaled their app http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2... Strangely, there have no status update so far regarding the issue: https://twitter.com/WhatsApp https://twitter.com/WhatsApp
- okgabr 13y agohttps://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640 https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640
- JetSpiegel 13y agoThat's not the verified account. Might as well be a bot, as far as everyone is concerned.
- theintern 13y agoIt's not, but it's linked to from their website, so it's official. https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/android/22014642 https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/android/22014642
- okgabr 13y agoWhatsapp tweeted this from 1hr: "sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly." https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640 https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640
- Freestyler_3 13y agoPorting all chats to your public wall takes up some load.
- PaulHoule 13y agoWow, it wasn't long before Facebook shut them down. ;-)
- gahahaha 13y agoThese accu-hires are getting out of control. (a little bit of quick math says that each employee was worth a bit less than 300 million dollars to Facebook.
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoLooks like they're taking Telegram down with them. It seems to me that the already massive rate at which WhatsApp users were fleeing to Telegram has accelerated to the point Telegram can't handle it anymore either.
- cliveowen 13y agoThey successfully migrated their operations on Facebook's data centers.
- ossreality 13y agoThe comments here blow anymore. Good thing I'm hell banned.
- okgabr 13y agoIt seems that people are running towards Telegram: "This is crazy. We'are getting 100 new registrations every second. Trying hard to prevent connection issues in Europe." https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437313902058426368 https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437313902058426368 UPDATE: Telegram is already facing connection issues in Europe caused by the "avalanche" of new users. https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360 https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360
- lmg643 13y agoOne of the key tenets of Warren Buffett's theory of investment value is based around "moats" - businesses that can't easily be replicated. It's impressive how large WhatsApp has grown but it might be more remarkable how quickly another service can grow in its place. Barriers to entry are continuously falling in mobile and tech in general.
- diminish 13y agofor messaging, there may be a rule similar to moore's for transistors; ... every 18 months a new messaging platform will be the go-to place.
- sjtgraham 13y agoThis is pretty ridiculous. Whatsapp solved two important problems. It was the first non-SMS cross-platform messaging service for mobile (telephone number as address, etc), and carriers were (and still are) price gouging on SMS pricing. Whatsapp quickly picked up initial users because of this and growth accelerated as it benefited from the massive network effects of more and more users joining the service. It's not clear that Whatsapp has any major problems as SMS does that would allow an upstart to make a significant incursion into Whatsapp's user base. Whatsapp also has massive network effect now, the switching cost seems too high.
- gress 13y agoThe switching cost being installing a different app?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- amaks 13y agoThey must be upgrading their servers to show ads and forward messages to facebook servers.
- pearjuice 13y agoSeeing how this will be a thread filled with witty jokes and Telegram fans, may I ask what Telegram their deal is? They do not intend to generate revenue yet put so much effort in marketing, securing and even payouts to breaches. Why? What is the cause? I might be one of these tinfoil hatters to some, but isn't this fishy? Why spend millions of dollars on yet-another-chatapp which can literally be replaced within days when a brand new app with some edgy feature gets out. Why? What is Telegram their deal?
- tobias2014 13y agoThe (only/main) advantage of Telegram over Whatsapp is for me: They have an open API, such that I can get a desktop client. (There is already a commandline version for linux) Also in principle there is end-to-end encryption, which is not a reason I switched. I'm not sure if this feature has been there when the 200k crypto contest went up with its criticism, but in principle it should be completely dependent on the client, which is opensource. Too bad XMPP/Jabber did not get a breakthrough, what is the reason for that? No user friendly client? Noone putting enough advertising into it; you can't make money with it? In germany there is currently a hype of Threema. Every magazine and newspaper writes about it being secure with end-to-end encryption. Even IT magazines just write naively about it, ignoring completely that it's closed source and noone can even see slightly behind the curtains. I rather prefer to see/know the flaws (Telegram) than use a proprietary solution that makes the masses "feel" good. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281338 Even that Threema costs some money makes people more confident of its security, with the reasoning that with a free solution you are not a customer but rather the product and you pay with your data.
- smw 13y agoThe desktop client/multiple platform thing is so huge, I don't understand why WhatsApp, for instance, avoids this. My group of friends uses a lot of iMessage, and I really hate the fact that I can neither use an iMessage app sitting in front of a Windows/Linux machine, nor can I use the iMessage app to view/respond to SMS from people who don't have iOS devices. Who wants to take your phone out of your pocket and hunt and peck on a tiny keyboard when you can just type ~80 wpm on the computer in front of you?
- znowi 13y agoI've been using Whatsapp for at least 2 years and this is the first outage that I recall. Might as well be a sudden influx of users. Although, knowing Zuckerberg, I equally accept all the "conspiracy" explanations in the thread :)
- theintern 13y agoYou've been using WA for 2 years and haven't noticed any issues? You obviously haven't been using it much. Regularly whatsapp has short issues where messages will not go through, this is just a particularly long one.
- DavideNL 13y agoMaybe Whatsapp can't handle the massive 'remove account' requests? :-)
- raverbashing 13y agoIt would be interesting if that was the problem For example, the "remove account" is not as efficient (for example, there's extra locking performed), and since removals are thought to be rare nobody bothered with its performance.
- znowi 13y agoIt's back online!
- WaterSponge 13y agoText only. No images and still no gif support.
- bhaumik 13y agoBack up again. 150 min delay Updated story: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-new-acquisition-confirms/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-...
- okgabr 13y agoUPDATE: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime..." https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437358172983279616 https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437358172983279616
- WaterSponge 13y agoImage uploads not working and still no gif support.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- oliwary 13y agoIt must be incredibly difficult to turn the whatsapp service back on after an outage, since most active users have probably sent a message that is waiting in the queue. Literally hundreds of millions of messages would hit the server once it goes up. Does anyone know how they handle this?
- sepbot 13y agoPerhaps they process them sequentially as opposed to concurrently.
- lucaspiller 13y agoActually this is the one of the things that annoyed me about WhatsApp - when it is down or you don't have a connection you can't queue messages to be sent. I frequent places without phone coverage (e.g. the Tube in London) and this was one of my big gripes. On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry" sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order). Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.
- oliwary 13y agoI'm pretty sure whatsapp does that - just tried sending a message while in flight mode, it appeared with a little clock to it, indicating it was going to be sent once back online.
- lucaspiller 13y agoRandom. It just says 'Connecting' for me.
- idleworx 13y agoI'm surprised no one's mentioned Kik. It's a great platform, and lots of users are switching to it now because of this aquisition. I think lots of people who are privacy conscious will make a move away from WhatsApp/Facebook in the next few months.
- deft 13y agoWhat about BBM? Kik completely copied BBM (the founder was an ex employee). BBM is a lot better in many ways, including real groups. Strange seeing BBM not try and capitalise on this purchase of Whtasapp by Facebook.
- mindstab 13y agothis is a bit weird. it should be unrealted and way too soon for microsoft to get their hands on it and two data points a pattern does not make, however: fairly reliable skype had a big outage the WEEK microsoft bought them and now WhatsApp is having a big outage days after Microsoft bought them. Best case it's a poor omen.
- crazypyro 13y agoSimple explanation is that the publicity increases use? Doesn't seem that weird to me.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago> two data points a pattern does not make, however WhatsApp is having a big outage days after Microsoft bought them. Um .... Whatsapp were bought by Facebook.
- adnam 13y agoUpptalk is up :)
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWhatsApp had (depending on who you talk to) about 55 employees at the time of the acquisition. We learned from Techcrunch that the only investor, Sequoia had about 20% of the outstanding stock (with everything converted to Commmon). So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That is roughly $30M per person. How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..." It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will never be the same.
- zhte415 13y agoThe elephant in the room is being ignored: Weixin (WeChat)
- motyar 13y agoIf you cant beat it, buy it and shut it down.