I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. Those were the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi upon learning of the latest WhatsApp outage yesterday, but the silence itself didn't last long. The effective pause extended for two hours, and in that interval users flocked to both Twitter and Facebook to express their frustration. This confirms our low tolerance for technical failures of multinational giants, and the framework of dependence that WhatsApp established in eight years.
A Two-Hour Silence
I made a quick visit to Facebook, and my feed was literally invaded by memes presenting WhatsApp in awkward situations. A little further down I found complaints and insults directed at Facebook for having 'ruined' WhatsApp with its purchase, and a long etcetera. The withdrawal syndrome had reached its peak: WhatsApp went down, and no one could do anything about it. The failure acquired a global profile, and remained so for two hours. It's the duration of a movie, or a chat with someone interesting, but the average WhatsApp user is not known for patience, and has no mercy when criticizing. The second most used instant messaging service on the planet has the backing of a titan like Facebook, and even so, it's not the first time this happens.
Technical details? None from the company. They barely shared a brief statement confirming the existence of the failure and its subsequent fix. Server error? Some kind of attack? We don't know, and that adds fuel to the fire. The irony of WhatsApp is that it has always shown deficiencies in 'communicating' its status. The official WhatsApp channel on Twitter hasn't received updates since February 2014, the month Facebook announced the purchase of the messenger. Another possibility is an interruption as a precursor to major changes within the service. My old Lumia 520 with Windows Phone 8.1 received an update for its WhatsApp client, but I didn't see anything like that on my Android device.
In short, what's one more stain on the tiger? WhatsApp will fall again, that's inevitable. In a way, the reactions are similar to those we saw when Microsoft's MSN Messenger threw in the towel for a while. It took WhatsApp eight years to go from a simple isolated messenger to occupying a place of privilege in the daily communications of billions of people. WhatsApp reached that delicate point where failing is not an option. And please, tell us what happened.
