The Facebook-owned apps faced a massive outage on Friday. The major social media apps including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram were down for as long as 45 minutes. The social media giant blamed a technical issue for the global outage. Meanwhile, WhatsApp’s rival Signal saw a perfect opportunity to take potshots at the messaging app.
Signal not only took a dig at WhatsApp but also used the opportunity to invite more users to join the app. “Signal registrations are through the roof; welcome everyone! Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage. People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are "looking forward to some weekend downtime,” the app posted on Twitter.
Signal witnessed a sudden surge in users when WhatsApp announced its new privacy policy. With very little information about what WhatsApp's new policies mean, scores of users migrated to other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal, thinking that WhatsApp will gain access to their personal conversation. WhatsApp was to roll out its new terms of service but by looking at the public reaction, the company had to postpone it till May 15. However, now WhatsApp is determined than ever to roll out its new policies by May 15. It has started sending in-app reminders to users to accept the new terms of service to continue using the messaging app.
WhatsApp has shared details about how the policy change will affect the users. It has repeatedly mentioned that the chats are end-to-end encrypted and apart from the sender and the receiver nobody can access the chats, not even WhatsApp. The company has also shared that it will not share any information of the user with Facebook, contrary to reports.
Coming back to the global outage, users across the globe were not able to use WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram for almost an hour. The Facebook and Instagram feed was not getting refreshed and users were unable to send or receive messages on WhatsApp. Downdetector, the outage tracking website, revealed that the apps went down between 11 pm and 11:40 pm. Over 1.2 million users reported issues with WhatsApp on the website.
Acknowledging the issue, a Facebook spokesperson said, "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
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