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WhatsApp Rings in the New Year with a Global Outage (venturebeat.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the WhatsApp-doc dept.

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.

40 comments

  1. WhatsDwn ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 1

    ... is the anti.

    --
    It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    1. Re:WhatsDwn ... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      What goes app must go dwn, you mean?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:WhatsDwn ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 1

      Well played.

      --
      It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
  2. Ans. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    #NotUGize

  3. meanwhile people with real lives ... by sittingnut · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trump's life as a free man is about to come to an end, so that's a positive note to end the year! :D

      Dream on.
      But rememeber such fantasies can end in tears as on Nov 10, 2016.
      However, there is indeed a positive side, your tears will be great entertainment for people who live in real world, as on that day.

    2. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > enjoyed the dawning of new year.

      Its not the New Year yet, not even on the East Coast.

    3. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by chispito · · Score: 1

      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?

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    4. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by war4peace · · Score: 1

      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 social media today)

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    5. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by thedude1249 · · Score: 1

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

    6. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Who owns WhatsApp?

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    7. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by Locke2005 · · Score: 1

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

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    8. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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

      Perhaps. Perhaps not.
      There is something wonderful and just in seeing hard reality bursting hubristic superficial bubble lives of elites, and their willing ignorant slaves, smugly indifferent to others' pain that make their lives possible.

    9. Re:meanwhile people with real lives ... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      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.

  4. what's WhatsApp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What does it do?

    1. Re:what's WhatsApp by sheramil · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:what's WhatsApp by sanf780 · · Score: 1
      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 haven't checked this one, but nobody reported IRC going down.

    3. Re:what's WhatsApp by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      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 bought them. They're currently in some legal difficulty in the EU, because one of the conditions of allowing the takeover to proceed was that Facebook wouldn't share data between Facebook and WhatsApp. Now Facebook is saying that this is too hard and so they're not going to do it.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:what's WhatsApp by johanw · · Score: 0

      On each a thread about WhatsApp, there are always Americans who want to show off that their technological development is stuck in the 1990's.

    5. Re:what's WhatsApp by johanw · · Score: 0

      Signal was up! No problems calling.

    6. Re:what's WhatsApp by Locke2005 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    7. Re:what's WhatsApp by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      What does it do?

      Stuff that nerds and geeks who read Slashdot know about.

  5. NSA hooking in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    what else are these weird global outages? Has WhatsApp been secure, ever? We can't know. Most likely it isn't, and if you run it on your iPhone f.ex. then the weird long delays between push to Apple to when update is available to download, typically means the app has been modified.

    1. Re:NSA hooking in by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      +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".

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    2. Re: NSA hooking in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can you imagine how many people deleted and re-download what could be a modified version of WhatsApp?

  6. Interesting mode of communication. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

    .. "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.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  7. Not my problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WhatsDat -- never heard of it.

    Suck to be WhatsDat.

  8. Is that what global means? by chispito · · Score: 1
    Does "global" really mean

    WhatsApp went down in several parts of the world

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

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
  9. OH NO! It must be the Y2K18 bug!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We thought we beat the Y2K bug but now it's come back 18 years later! We're doomed!

  10. So Facebook's toy isn't working? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So Facebook's toy isn't working?

  11. 24 th post by plopez · · Score: 1

    Missed 23rd by this much...

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  12. WhatsApp is like 5 9s. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The fact that itâ(TM)s down, why, and how it was fixed should be instructive to /. nerds. Letâ(TM)s talk about how it happened, how to prevent it, and post about Erlang, OTP, failover whatever.

    But no, Trump and one liners. Where did the old /. go?

  13. always happens by Espectr0 · · Score: 1

    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

    --
    Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
  14. And in a panic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    People delete the app and re-download. Anything new show up in Terms and Conditions? Code? You know, it is VERY possible that backdoor thing EVERY single one of the affected countries has been wanting for years finally showed up. They picked a largely celebrated holiday to do it so if enough people did notice, they could blame just about anything.

    1. Re: And in a panic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, and anyone that uses VPN's enough can see the relation to locations of popular VPN servers too.

  15. Bad karna by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's karma for a crappy UI/UX.

    No previews for voice/sound?

    Since they were bought out, the product has suffered a narrow scope of development priorities (according to my sources). Too bad, really.

  16. If only we had some sort of website.. by gosand · · Score: 1

    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.

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.