WhatsApp was down for over an hour on Tuesday, with users unable to send or receive messages. Both personal and group chats were impacted. WhatsApp down: What did the company say on the outage? A spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, issued a statement saying, “We're aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we're working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.” Meta also owns Facebook. Was the WhatsApp outage only in India? It seemed like a wider outage. WhatsApp said nothing officially, but the hashtag #WhatsAppDown was trending on Twitter, and users from Indonesia, Kenya, and some Spanish-speaking territories, other than Indians, were complaining of trouble with the messaging app. What was the problem? Again, there was no information from WhatsApp. In October 2021, Meta-owned platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — went down for about six hours after a major DNS failure. DNS or Domain Name System is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like indianexpress.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses. If DNS is not working properly, your computer will be unable to connect to the servers that host the website one is looking for. But in this case, the problem was connected to BGP routing. BGP — short for Border Gateway Protocol — is the system that helps one network find the best route to a different network. Earlier in March 2021, WhatsApp was down for about 45 minutes, and Meta attributed the outage to “a technical issue” that “caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services”, but gave no specific reason. In 2020, there were four major WhatsApp outages, of which the most major one was in January, which lasted for around three hours. After this, there was one in April, followed by a two-hour outage in July and a brief one in August 2020. In July 2019, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp services across the world suffered disruptions with people complaining that they were unable to either post or see their feeds or photographs. For products from the Facebook stable, that was the third major outage of the year. Why do these outages happen? With over 2 billion users on WhatsApp and almost 3 billion on Facebook, it is highly unlikely that services are disrupted for all active users across the world. This is because a service this large needs to be hosted at multiple data centres across the world, all in their own protective silos. A product change could, however, affect all users. But with a user base this large such changes are not released in one go and rolled out of different sets of consumers gradually. This gives the leeway to revert if something goes wrong without impacting the entire base. Are outages becoming more frequent? It certainly seems like that. With the kind of user bases Facebook’s services have, we are in uncharted waters when it comes to the Internet. Managing such large user bases smoothly is something most of these companies are learning on the go. Also, there is growing dependence on third party services to manage these users. So any small issue gets amplified to millions of users.
