The news of the down from Facebook is now everywhere. And with good reason. In fact, never before has Zuckerberg’s platforms stopped working for more than 5 consecutive hours. An outage that cost the company a whopping $ 6 billion. And that has also affected the users themselves. Not posting a photo on Instagram, in fact, is certainly deleterious for all of us, but the WhatsApp down it really put us in an unusual condition. The messaging service is now part of our life. And losing it, even for a few hours, was enormous damage. Indeed, it was like going back in time.
WhatsApp Down: the return to the old communication
Only in February last year WhatsApp announced that it had 2 billion users worldwide. An important number, if we consider that Facebook has 2.5 billion. Not surprisingly, the messaging service is the most used tool to get in touch with friends and relatives all over the world. But WhatsApp is also something more than just a simple one messaging platform, because he is working to become an important business tool. Already in October 2020, for example, 175 million people used the App to contact companies.
Six hours of WhatsApp down, therefore, represented a very evident problem. With the platform inactive, users could not exchange messages and calls – effectively returning to the communication of the 90s -, customer services could not process requests, and the circulation of important news was put on standby. In short, the WhatsApp malfunction has had a huge impact on our life, almost leaving us lost. At the same time, however, this turned out to be an imperial opportunitydibile for competitors in the sector.
Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it’s like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays
— Signal (@signalapp) October 4, 2021
On the other hand, it is quite clear that when WhatsApp and Facebook don’t work, Signal e Telegram have the opportunity to gain ground. And win over users, above all. But this Signal knows it well. In any case, to know how many people will really choose to use a service other than WhatsApp, we should wait for everything to really return to normal. There could be yet another migration of users, it is clear. But what we need to reflect on is how a WhatsApp down can change the course of our day.