In my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.
Seems global outage:
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.ht...</a><p>Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
In Europe it's used a lot by small businesses etc. it's pretty bad if it's not reliable.<p>The metaverse better be real good, else Meta will be in serious decline.
This is the time when people search for alternate messaging apps like Signal, Telegram :)
Totally forgot that I have installed both those apps and opened them today after more than a year.
Down in Uganda too. I was speaking to my cousin who just had a baby and told her I'd call back in 2 minutes to see the kid and then whatsapp went down!
Last week, KakaoTalk (the main messenger used in Korea) was down FOR A WHOLE DAY because of a fire in their (1!) data center. Let's see how long it takes WhatsApp to get back online.
Interestingly, a couple minutes before WA went down my messages were being sent while only displaying a single tick (as in the other parties could see my single-tick messages).<p>Thought it was quite weird/concerning that that could happen.
Yeah, down here in Portugal too. Even the local voluntary emergency responders reacted: <a href="https://twitter.com/vostpt/status/1584812996945383425" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vostpt/status/1584812996945383425</a>
What's the big issue here? Can't people remain in silence for a few hours without their usual communication.<p>Are we so dependent on these tools?<p>If there is something really urgent I don't think people would use WhatsApp in the first place, or when did you text with 911 the last time using WhatsApp?<p>Maybe we got even more productive and thoughtful during these cutt-off hours. Hours without notification, chit-chat and that social background hum we so much used to be in doesn't sound that bad, does it?
Yeah, same here in my current location Spain.<p>I was trying to send a message to wish good morning to the girl that I’m seeing, and WhatsApp was stuck on “connecting”.<p><a href="https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/</a> confirms that many other users are currently having problems connecting too.<p>Does WhatsApp have any official status page? I found an old twitter account that appears to be official but it hasn’t posted in ages.<p>Will they write post mortem analysis somewhere?
Global communication protocols and interfaces should be left to the ISPs, just like email and NNTP etc. used to be, and DNS still is.<p>Really, why can't everything be like DNS? You ask the nearest available authority about something, and that in turn asks the next nearest authority, until that shit is found. Would work for web search too.<p>When you need a pretty UI just put different client apps on top of it, just like we did/do for email and newsgroups.
Seems like a good time to plug Session: <a href="https://getsession.org/" rel="nofollow">https://getsession.org/</a><p>Open source, doesn't require a phone number, and a big strength is that it's decentralized, which makes it much less vulnerable to outages like this.<p>"Session utilises the decentralised Oxen Service Node Network to store
and route messages. This means that unlike P2P messaging applications
you can message Session users when they are offline.
This network consists of community operated nodes which are stationed
all over the world. Service nodes are organised into collections of small
co-operative groups called swarms.<p>Swarms offer additional redundancy and message delivery guarantees even if some service nodes become unreachable. By using this network, Session doesn’t have a central point
of failure, and Session’s creators have no capacity to collect or store
personal information about people using the app"
It seems bizarre to me that Europeans have to pay for sending international SMS, it's been free/unlimited in many places for 5 years.<p>Will carriers charge for RCS? How has Google got them to sign up without some fee?