On October 25, social media WhatsApp stopped working for more than two hours in many parts of the world. After 12 noon Indian time, there was a situation of not being able to send or receive messages through WhatsApp. There was no way to share status, update profile information or change privacy settings. Many were not able to make money transactions or share location through WhatsApp. What’s more, those who accidentally send messages and images to an unintended person or group are stuck without being able to delete them immediately! According to the information provided by Downdetector, a web service that tracks the service performance of WhatsApp and other social media, around 100,000 people complained to the company immediately after the WhatsApp stopped working.

While 69% experienced difficulty in sending messages, 24% experienced issues with WhatsApp server connection and 7% with the overall functionality of the app. #whatsappdown became one of the trending hashtags on Twitter as the issue was not resolved after more than half an hour. This is not the first time that WhatsApp has faced such a problem. What happens to WhatsApp every now and then? Should it be viewed with concern? There are 200 crore active WhatsApp users worldwide. 50 crore of them are in India. Naturally, India will also be worried if WhatsApp ‘falls’. That is why the Union IT Ministry has asked the company to explain what happened to WhatsApp.

∙ It has been fixed, but it will not say what the problem

was on October 25. WhatsApp restarted the service two hours after it was interrupted. A spokesperson for WhatsApp’s parent company, Metta, then reached out and apologized for the inconvenience caused to users. However, WhatsApp did not provide any information about what happened or how it was resolved. When the IT Ministry of India asked WhatsApp for an explanation about the service disruption, WhatsApp only said that it was a technical glitch.

∙ There have been strikes before,

this is not the first time that WhatsApp has stopped working like this. Earlier, WhatsApp stopped working for about six hours in another October like this, in 2021!. Back then Koot had Facebook and Instagram. The authorities then explained that the problem occurred during a configuration change and the operation of many apps under META stopped twice in a week in different places. In March 2021, WhatsApp and Instagram were also engaged for three and a half hours. WhatsApp was down four times in 2020 – for 3 hours in January, 2 hours in July and less than half an hour in April and August.

∙ Why does the activity stop?

Although not much information is available about the issue this time, service performance trackers identified the issue in October 2021 as being in the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS provides a service that converts hostnames written in letters into IP addresses written in numbers. When there are problems with this, the system will not be able to understand which website the user is looking for and take us to the IP address with that hostname. Similarly any system or server connection or other malfunctions lead to apps crashing.

Satisfying a large user base and providing 24/7 service is a daunting task for Meta. However, there has not yet been a situation where the service is disrupted for all users at once. This is because they operate in multiple data centers in different parts of the world. When there are more than 200 crore WhatsApp users and more than 300 crore Facebook users, it is not appropriate to work in such a way that the data traffic from everywhere reaches a single place. In the last outage, users in India, where WhatsApp has the largest number of users, and places like the US, Canada, Italy, Turkey, the UK, Spain and some African countries, faced more difficulty.

∙ Is there an alternative to the giant WhatsApp?

There are those who have benefited from such ‘strike’ crisis that WhatsApp and other meta apps have faced many times. It was only when WhatsApp had to be separated for a while that the market felt the need for other apps that could be relied upon in such situations. Apps like Telegram and Signal have capitalized on that opportunity and tried to gain more acceptance among the masses. Since then, the number of users of these apps has increased, but they have not yet been able to come close to the ‘WhatsApp giant’. The features and ease of use provided by WhatsApp paves the way for this. According to 2020 data, more than 10,000 crore messages are sent through WhatsApp every day in the world. WhatsApp has achieved this rapid growth since 2016, when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined sent around 6000 crore messages daily.

∙ Should we be so afraid of WhatsApp going on strike?

The answer is yes. With so many users, this social media is no longer just an entertainment tool. WhatsApp plays a major role in the functioning of the market and many offices. Government and private institutions and individuals in various sectors rely on WhatsApp for office and business purposes and for easy communication. So, even a short stoppage of the app’s functionality can have a huge impact on the market and so on. WhatsApp is also used by most of the people to quickly exchange information about the deviations in the share market. So, there too, many are facing losses. 

Such strike is also affecting the income of those who used to run small businesses through WhatsApp and Instagram. Also, there remains a concern that if an enterprise is built solely on social media, it may collapse at any moment. Now social media is being used for various campaigns and political activities in the world and this is causing a crisis there as well. While Facebook was down, it even affected the smooth functioning of some other apps that provide login with Facebook ID like a ‘domino effect’ (when there is a problem, other problems follow).