What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK An outage has hit global messaging system WhatApp early on Tuesday morning. Owned by social media giant Meta, the mobile instant messaging platform saw users begin to report service outages from around 09:00 UTC. More than 12,000 reports were posted within half an hour, according to the service status website Down Detector. …
It is the monopoly biting us again. If whatsapp was like the phone system, then we would have gobally dozens of companies running the whatsapp network, not just Z limited liability.
This time will be in the history books as the time of the monopolies, whatever tech or services ones buys, in many cases there are 2 alternatives and at best 5.
The cherry on the cake is that these monopolists have the same incestuous relationship with governments as the church used to have in the middle ages.
The great thing though is that Whatsapp isn't a monopoly - there are many different messaging platforms about, and it's entirely possible to not use one at all and still communicate with people. The only way I ever find out that Farcebook or any other of these sites is down is by seeing a news article about it.
The problem is the massive inertia of the shift. If I want to shift to Signal I have to consider either keeping Whatsapp anyway to keep in contact with all others on my list or convince all of my contacts to then make the same consideration. In the end you end up with too many people that go: "eh, can't be bothered" and you have to either stick with existing apps to keep contact with them or lose contact over this. I've long since decided convincing others to put in the effort to convince others that then have to put in the effort to convince yet others is too much effort. I've objected to Meta gobbling my data in time, so theoretically they shouldn't be slurping my data to the Zuckership, I'll live with it for now.
I managed many of my friends' move to Signal. I have to say, it was a good uptake. I only have one cousin that has yet to connect. But these are users from many parts of the world, some, believe it or not, don't have What's APP or it's not popular... so that was a big factor in adoption of Signal.
WhatsApp has a hiccup and half of Europe is standing on its back feet.
This is merely a shot across the bow for what will ensue when WhatsApp terminates service in the UK after the government demands backdoors to be installed. Mayhem and chaos as angry Brits demand their MP's to restore service.
A least people will stop sending me stupid and “funny” messages for a few hours. People don’t use WhatsApp for serious communication and everyone can fallback to old, simple and as unsecured as WhatsApp SMS messaging for anything life or death and to email for anything that have multimedia. Jake Moore, global cyber security advisor at infosec vendor ESET, and anyone else telling you that an outage in WhatsApp is a catastrophe, is just lying thru their teeth.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
