How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
Many countries outside the US rely on WhatsApp for communication. I imagine even a few hours of non-communication wouldn’t be good for the economy or emergency services.
I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west.
At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billions to invest in robust, secure IT infrastructure.
The sad thought crossed my mind: people using Whatsapp to have last calls with family members dying of e.g. COVID, trying terribly to get onto telegram or something but having no luck getting through since everything was degraded.
Kinda ruined the few hours of fun for me.
All of us because thats all anyone talked about today
It would be pretty irresponsible for emergency services to be dependent on WhatsApp or anything of its ilk.
Whatsapp contacts are phone numbers, so you can just call or text them with the phone network instead if it's essential.
I use whatsapp for ALL my communication, and I got an incredible number of missed calls from family across the ocean because I wasn't answering.
Nothing important, but my parents sure lost some sleep.
I am sure I am one of the few who's live is so unimportant that I can be offline for a day without anyone panicking / loosing lucrative deals / missing once in a live time opportunities, but boy do I feel blessed.
The time I needed to be available as badly as most of you seem today, I carried at least 2 phones, from 2 different providers from 2 different countries and was instructed how to get where in case of a (comms) blackout.
Glad that's over for me, hope you guys are all well.
Slightly offtopic but my ISP has been having issues all over the country, I’ve been down 8 hrs. From the few people who could get customer service they aren’t admitting to any large scale outage either just following the usual “reset your device” script which is suspicious.
My first world problems were greatly exacerbated by Whatsapp being down.
I could not communicate with my in-laws via WhatsApp which meant I actually had to speak to them in person.
I did not even realise it was down till it was over… I ignore my WhatsApp messages for as long as I can usually!
if whatsapp being down for a few hours negatively affects your life...time to get a backup plan
Some number less than their active user count?
Ask a leading question; get a flippant answer.
I’d find the cries for empathy to the poor affected users more compelling if it weren’t for the fact that anyone of working age can remember a time when these technologies didn’t exist. If it’s a tragedy that you didn’t have access to a novel technology for six hours, then I’d question the health of your relationship to it, and the wisdom of any economic choices you’ve made which depend upon it.
If your life gets negatively affected by whatsapp being unavailable, order a new life instead.
At least install Signal, Telegram et al and wean everyone else out of fb-wa.