Panic! Despair! Switch to Facebook Messenger!…Ah, I see what you did there, Facebook. Mobile messaging application WhatsApp is this morning experiencing its second major outage since Facebook bought the company in February for $19 billion.
According to TechCrunch tipsters, reports on Twitter and DownDetector.com, the service has been experiencing issues for roughly an hour, at least in some parts of the world, though we’re working to confirm this right now with the company, which has yet to provide an official update on the situation via its WhatsApp Status Twitter account.
DownDetector.com, a site that monitors web companies’ outages, reports that WhatsApp has been having issues since 8:34 AM ET.
And while I’m joking about Facebook’s involvement here – obviously they don’t want to lose users on a platform they bought for its mobile messaging market share – it’s always funny to see the conspiracy theories roll in:
“Whatsapp is down, now everyone is back to Facebook. Mission Accomplished.” claps
— alison dilaurentis (@fghsxx) April 2, 2014
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Funny how #whatsapp never went down before Facebook bought it out… — Erin Lawless (@rinylou) April 2, 2014
#whatsappdown We are working hard to make Facebook Messenger UP. pic.twitter.com/0ldhHSl3di
— ＩＲＦＡＮ (@SimplyIrfan) April 2, 2014
Users report seeing a system status message which reads, “Sorry, our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
I like that they apologized twice.
Timeline now: Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down. Whatsapp down.
— Mark Zachary (@markzachary98) April 2, 2014
Despite the usual complaints from the vocal minority who claimed they were “deleting WhatsApp” following the Facebook deal, in reality, the service’s usage has exploded in the days since.
In fact, the company announced last night on Twitter it had hit a new record high of 64 billion messages handled within 24 hours, with 20 billion messages sent and 44 billion messages received worldwide. (WhatsApp counts a message received by group members separately, which is why the received count is higher.)
The company’s previous record high was 54 billion on New Year’s Eve 2013.
new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014
WhatsApp’s previous outage lasted 210 minutes, to give you an idea of how quickly the company could come back from your typical server failure. We should know soon, however, if today’s outage is something more serious. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: WhatsApp never responded to our inquiry (hmm), but the outage appears to be resolved:
