It's easy to forget about the company's reach in the chaos caused by Monday's Facebook outage. It's annoying to not be able to upload a new Instagram photo, but it isn't necessarily a major problem. WhatsApp users outside the US will find losing Facebook's encrypted messaging service a significant life-altering change. One competitor messaging service was eager to capitalize today.
WhatsApp announced that it has 2 billion users worldwide in February 2013. It's easy for you to see the impact WhatsApp has on people when you compare that number to Facebook's original 2.5 billion users. WhatsApp has become the standard method of communicating with people in many countries. Bloomberg reports that there are approximately 400 million Indian users who use it monthly. This goes beyond casual communication: WhatsApp also aims to be a crucial tool for businesses. In-app payments are already accepted in Brazil and India by WhatsApp. WhatsApp claims that 175 million people worldwide use its app to communicate with businesses every day.
WhatsApp is down. This means that WhatsApp messages and calls to family and friends can go unanswered. Customer service requests are unaddressed and important organizing information is not distributed. Unless it is blocked, the secure messaging app is often used by organizers to organize demonstrations and protests.
An outage of WhatsApp is a problem for those who depend on it but could be a boon for other encrypted messaging apps. When Facebook and WhatsApp fail, the major players, Telegram and Signal, as well as iMessage in the US, stand to gain. Only Signal has won a public victory lap so far.
Signal is a great place to sign up (welcome all!) We know how it feels to be in an outage and we wish all the engineers involved with restoring service on other platforms #mondays Signal October 4, 2021
The Verge was not able to obtain specific numbers from the company, but they did state that Signal was seeing increased sign-ups. This month also saw the release of WhatsApp's controversial privacy policy for business messaging. Facebook itself came under fire for its role in the Capitol riots of January 6. Telegram and Apple didn't immediately respond to a request.
Facebook is currently working to restore its services. It will take longer before we know the true impact on how many people were affected by the Facebook outage. It's safe to say that it was more frustrating than being unable to update your story.
