WhatsApp is down

Whatsapp 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

Freestyler_3• 12 years ago

Porting all chats to your public wall takes up some load.

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

Wow, it wasn't long before Facebook shut them down. ;-)

gahahaha2• 12 years ago

These 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• 12 years ago

Looks 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• 12 years ago

They successfully migrated their operations on Facebook's data centers.

okgabr4• 12 years ago

It 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

UPDATE: Telegram is already facing connection issues in Europe caused by the "avalanche" of new users. https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360

lmg6432• 12 years ago

One 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• 12 years ago

for 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.

sgloutnikov• 12 years ago

Viber has also been steadily growing along side WhatsApp. I think they had around 200M users last summer. A great thing they have that was not in WhatsApp is free VoIP calling.

porter• 12 years ago

messaging has network effects no?

adnam4• 12 years ago

Except Whatsapp has a very strong network effect that's difficult to replicate (the other person must also have the app). That's why we designed Upptalk to interoperate with standard telephony services like SMS and SIP.

ereckers• 12 years ago

100 new registrations every second... wow.

And I thought the Facebook hate was mainly in the tech circles. I guess it's a real "thing". 100 registrations per second can't all be HNers.

dubbel• 12 years ago

I read that Germans are really into the alternative messengers right now. My Facebook feed with old (non-techy) highschool friends is full of "Go Threema" or "You can reach me via Telegram".

amaks• 12 years ago

They must be upgrading their servers to show ads and forward messages to facebook servers.

pearjuice• 12 years ago

Seeing 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• 12 years ago

The (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 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.

smw3• 12 years ago

The 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?

smw3• 12 years ago

I think there were two major technical issues stopping the overwhelming adoption of mobile XMPP/Jabber:

1) Apple push notifications were the only method of reliably delivering on demand messages to iOS devices, so to provide expected (app in background) behavior on iOS, someone had to provide an always on proxy between XMPP and iOS push notifications, and that proxy had to have your credentials. This required ongoing expense on the server side combined with a client side app.

2) XMPP is connection oriented and doesn't handle the disruption of disconnections and changing IPs/networks when a mobile device roams or transitions from wifi to cellular data.

On the political side, I think GTalk had, by far, the largest network of XMPP users. As I understand it, they've tried to solve some of these problems with proprietary protocol changes which resulted in the Hangouts app and the subsequent dropping of full XMPP support by google: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...

cuillevel3• 12 years ago

ChatSecure is using XMPP

znowi2• 12 years ago

I'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 :)

theintern2• 12 years ago

You'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.

chaz2• 12 years ago

WA has had issues with delayed messages, too. Not so helpful to get those, "I'm running 15 minutes late" messages 3 hours later.

DavideNL• 12 years ago

Maybe Whatsapp can't handle the massive 'remove account' requests? :-)

raverbashing• 12 years ago

It 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.

znowi2• 12 years ago

It's back online!

WaterSponge2• 12 years ago

Text only. No images and still no gif support.

bhaumik• 12 years ago

Back up again. 150 min delay

Updated story: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-...

okgabr4• 12 years ago

UPDATE: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime..." https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437358172983279616

WaterSponge2• 12 years ago

Image uploads not working and still no gif support.

oliwary2• 12 years ago

It 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• 12 years ago

Perhaps they process them sequentially as opposed to concurrently.

lucaspiller3• 12 years ago

Actually 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.

oliwary2• 12 years ago

I'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.

idleworx• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years ago

What 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• 12 years ago

this 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.

crazypyro2• 12 years ago

Simple explanation is that the publicity increases use? Doesn't seem that weird to me.

SideburnsOfDoom• 12 years 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.

adnam4• 12 years ago

Upptalk is up :)

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

WhatsApp 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.

crazypyro2• 12 years ago

I wonder how many employees that got stock options will just retire...

judk3• 12 years ago

But their checks haven't cleared yet...

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

And that is the difference between having been there before, and not having been there before sadly.

zhte415• 12 years ago

The elephant in the room is being ignored: Weixin (WeChat)

motyar• 12 years ago

If you cant beat it, buy it and shut it down.

WhatsApp is down

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