Just the other day, WhatsApp users experienced an outage that lasted for several hours; this was just a few days after the same thing happened to Kenya’s biggest telecommunication company, Safaricom. The two incidences have no relation to each other whatsoever. The WhatsApp outage happened in several countries around the world.
The Instant Messaging giant released a statement to inform the users that they are working on fixing the issue just moments after it started at 20:00 GMT. However, many hours later, users could still not send or receive any messages over the platform.
Analysts blamed the issue on the fact that there have been numerous updates of the WhatsApp application lately, with every iteration, changes are made to lines of code which can be very risky. A mistake in one line can crash the whole system; sometimes even something as small as omitting a comma can be catastrophic. The team at WhatsApp must be under intense pressure to deliver all the features we have been reporting to you lately. Sure the beta app helps catch some of the bugs before they roll out to the masses but that plan is not always fool proof.
This outage comes after the status feature hit 175 million daily active users. This means that it has more usage than Snapchat (the inventor of the feature) which clocks in at 161 million daily active users. It seems that despite the criticism the feature got, people have slowly warmed up to it. The news brings two of Facebook’s product at a lead over Snapchat, Instagram just boosted of its 200 million usage the other day.
Ultimately, we do not feel that the recent outage will slow down the feature. People are too vested into the WhatsApp platform to let just one mistake make them jump ship. Now that the text based status is back, the two features will now complement each other and grow tremendously.