WhatsApp Rings in the New Year with a Global Outage

WhatsApp went down in several parts of the world today including parts of Europe, Asia, and South America. The crowdsourced website DownDetector found the largest concentration of outages in portions of England, Germany, and virtually all of the Netherlands, as well as parts of Italy, Spain, and central Europe. Outages were also reported in many major cities around the world, from Rio de Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur, and Tel Aviv to Dubai, Mumbai, and Toronto... "WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience," a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

WhatsDwn ...

[CaptainDork]

... is the anti.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

What goes app must go dwn, you mean?

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[CaptainDork]

Well played.

meanwhile people with real lives ...

[sittingnut]

enjoyed the dawning of new year.

why care for anyone who lives on whatsass/social media? they should "out" their non lives. they don't matter.

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[Locke2005]

If you are entertained by other people's tears, you just might be a terrible human being.

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[chispito]

enjoyed the dawning of new year.

why care for anyone who lives on whatsass/social media? they should "out" their non lives. they don't matter.

How do you conflate an instant messenger with a social media? Is texting social media?

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[TheRaven64]

Who owns WhatsApp?

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[war4peace]

I used it briefly to send a quick greeting to otherwise unreachable friends and relatives (e.g. from other countries, not in town, too drunk to carry a phone conversation, etc). I saw the messages not going out, shrugged and left the phone be. The messages eventually went through and I got replies.

So... there's that. If you can gather everyone you care about in one place, physically, that's awesome. Some people can't for a plethora of reasons.

(see I'm not asking you what is it that you're doing here on soci

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[thedude1249]

Whatsapp is surely useful. I use it with all of my family who's abroad.

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[thegarbz]

WhatsApp is the largest used messaging platform in many countries and not at all a social media platform.

Good luck enjoying your new years when you're unable to meet up with your friends because they can't be contacted.

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[sheramil]

According to wikipedia, it's an instant message / VOIP / file exchange thing for mobile phones, although it has a desktop presence as well, so I'm guessing it's another way for big data to see what teenagers are interested in this week.

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[sanf780]

Just so that you know, WhatsApp might be installed in over 90% or more of the smartphones in some countries in Europe. And there might be more smartphones than population in a few of these countries. People of all ages are using this tool. Even people that cannot agree to the TOS, like children under 13, are using it.

Regarding the OP, 10 or 20 years ago, the landline phone system was going down at 12.01am 1st of January, local time. It is now whatever mobile application the populace fancies these days. I ha

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[TheRaven64]

It wasn't. It was created by a couple of guys who grew up in the USSR and wanted a platform that they could use to communicate with friends and family abroad, without anyone being able to spy on it. They even had a decent business model: the service was free for a year (so people got used to it and made their friends sign up) and then $1/year after that (cheap enough that it wasn't worth caring about, but more than the cost of providing the service, by quite a large amount). Unfortunately, then Facebook

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[Locke2005]

Apparently it allows you to make international phone calls for free. At 4pm today, my ex's phone lit up with continuous calls of people wishing her happy new year, to the point where she just shut if off. Yes, her friends all live in GMT and are incapable of doing the math to understand the PST is GMT -8 hours! Of course, I strategically avoid the problem of getting too many greetings by having zero friends.

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[thegarbz]

What does it do?

Stuff that nerds and geeks who read Slashdot know about.

If only we had some sort of website..

[gosand]

where you could type in that question and it could provide the answer.
That would be great.
It would be like an information butler.
I suggest we invent it and call it ... Ask Jeeves.

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[AHuxley]

+1 the CIA, NSA, MI6 and GCHQ are working overtime in places like Iran.
Trying for another color revolution that needs online encrypted communication to organise the spontaneous "protesters".

Interesting mode of communication.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

.. "WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience," a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

So... that's what email is good for. To let people know WhatsApp is down.

Is that what global means?

[chispito]

Does "global" really mean

WhatsApp went down in several parts of the world

I thought it was synonymous with "worldwide," meaning everywhere.

24 th post

[plopez]

Missed 23rd by this much...

always happens

[Espectr0]

i stopped using it to call relatives around christmas or new years. the servers get massive traffic and you can't get through. has happened for 3 or 4 straight years in a row