WhatsApp is currently experiencing an outage. Users around the world are reporting that they haven’t been able to send messages for about two hours, and WhatsApp just confirmed this problems with a tweet stating “sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”
sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.
— WhatsApp Status (@wa_status) February 22, 2014
WhatsApp users are flocking to Twitter asking “Is WhatsApp down?”. They’re being met with memes joking that Facebook is shutting WhatsApp down or that its founders are now on vacation. In reality, it’s more likely that its $19 billion acquisition by Facebook announced Wednesday led to a surge of signups and usage that has overloaded its servers. We’ve contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response.
When users (including me) try to send messages or check their existing chat conversations, WhatsApp gets stuck, showing an endless loading asterisk and the alert “Connecting…”
The “WhatsDown” reports started flooding in around 11am PST, but there were some troubles last night as well. We’ve received tips from frustrated users in the US, India, Israel, and many places around the world. The outage could stoke fears that Facebook will screw up WhatsApp if the acquisition gets regulatory approval.
The down time may be pushing users to other chat apps, as Telegram just tweeted:
In a testament to the global popularity of WhatsApp amongst its 450 million users, condom brand Durex’s Kenyan branch is capitalizing on the outage to do some marketing:
As I wrote Thursday, being acquired by Facebook could give WhatsApp the engineering backup to be able to fight outages in the future. But for now, being the biggest venture-backed acquisition in history is working against the messaging startup.
WhatsApp has suffered short downtimes every month or two for the last half-year. Stumbles like this are somewhat common for fast-growing apps, and users aren’t likely to permanently switch away as long as this is fixed relatively soon.Facebook bought the startup for the astronomical sum in part because it is many people in the developing world’s first taste of the Internet. Now, their first taste of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been soured.
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