WhatsApp Users Are Reporting Outages Worldwide (metro.co.uk) 44
sombragris writes: WhatsApp, a proprietary instant messaging platform owned by Facebook and used by millions of users, is currently down according to user reports from various parts of the world. There's no official word yet on the cause but I'm among the many affected by the outages. UPDATE 5/3/17: "Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologize for the inconvenience," WhatsApp said in an email late Wednesday afternoon.
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WhatsApp Users Are Reporting Outages Worldwide
And there was much rejoicing
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Then they can use something else.
Sure. An entire country, please switch over to Facebook or something else quickly. Share all you contacts among each other so you can send your messages. Quick, whatsapp is down!
Not gonna happen. Ever.
stupid solutions (Score:2)
WhatsApp is valuable
Which actually doesn't as much show that WhatsApp has some value (as opposed to any other messaging system),
but shows how bad it is to rely on a single centralized service.
(as opposed to things which are a bit more distributed : like e-mail, like XMPP chat server with federation switched on, ...)
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The value in a messaging system is in the users not the system.
Tell you what: Right now where I live I can send anyone a whatsapp message, even someone who's number I just read off a business card, and with certainty I know it will work.
I actually did just that yesterday to my tax accountant because their email server was rejecting my email as spam.
Can you say the same thing for {insert unused and generally unknown service here}?
Short term memory (Score:2)
The value in a messaging system is in the users not the system.
A.k.a. "Network effect". /. is nearly entirely composed of geeks, who by definition have weird fetishes regarding technology (and not only... ahem...)
As
we are all constantly exposed to this whenever we try to persuade the vanilla people around us to try some new tech.
Tell you what: Right now where I live I can send anyone a whatsapp message, even someone who's number I just read off a business card,
The keyword is "Right now".
A couple of years ago it used to be some other system (Apple's iPhone-only iMessage).
then Facebook Messenger (still have some contact stuck on this one),
now it's WhatsApp,
next year it's going to be SnapChat (*)
And who
In other news (Score:2)
Productivity mysteriously increased at a lot of companies today.
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You mean decreased. When the message doesn't get through I actually have to get up and go talk to the person I'm sending a message to.
Probably the Google Docs exploits (Score:1)
Next time don't open attached documents even if they are from people you know.
Thanks for that. (Score:2)
Slashot on top of basically breaking news. A rare moment.
Explains several issues for me today.
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Nah - if you follow the link, it's actually a 'breaking story' about the last time it was down. We'll hear about the current outage in a week or two.
NSA spying tool is taking a while to install (Score:1)
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Both links are in German but translation services should help.
http://www.zeit.de/digital/dat... [www.zeit.de]
https://netzpolitik.org/2016/p... [netzpolitik.org]
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Germany is going for its ANISKI project to study non standardized communication.
They can't make diesel engines without cheating, I'm not worried about their encryption breaking skills.
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I use it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I use it (Score:4, Insightful)
+1.
It works well internationally. Signal is the other alternative. In all cases, such apps are quite needed : MMS picture quality is crap, international texting/MMS costs a lot in many countries .. or sometimes doesn't even work.
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But is mostly sent in plain text and easily snooped.
Re:I use it (Score:4, Interesting)
Email is better
By what metric?
Instant?: No
Encrypted?: No
Message gets to end user instantly without changing hands a thousand times?: No
Message guaranteed to get to target and not null routed, reported as spam?: No
Delivery confirmation?: No
Able to support video calls?: No
Able to support audio calls?: No
Able to send pictures and attachments knowing exactly what the limits are and not being randomly rejected?: No
Free of spam?: No
Actually the not being tied to a corporation thing is about the only thing email has going for it. I can't think of a single upside to email otherwise.
god bless it (Score:2)
those 3000 new hires are for the video feed, not to watch all whatsapp users.
If it is not (Score:2)
completely peer-to-peer and relies on centralized services it is not much use.
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it is not much use.
There's 30 billion messages sent daily on Whatsapp. I don't know what you consider of "much use".
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There's 30 billion messages sent daily on Whatsapp.
Except when their servers are down apparently.
Which is fine so long as you don't use it for anything important.
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People outside of the geek bubble don't care about peer to peer. Mostly they don't care about encryption either (although WhatsApp does have end to end encryption). They care about what their friends use. Whatsapp has a critical mass. I use it because of the people I want to talk to, not because of its technical qualities.
And at least it's not Facebook Messenger... although it still surprises me that FB haven't eliminated it to have a single messaging platform to support, given that they own WhatsApp.
I'm al
For the First Time in Forever (Score:1)