WhatsApp’s service is like a wave cycle with crests equaling claims of 64 billion messages processed in a single day and trough equaling service outage in the same day itself.
“new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours”, tweeted WhatsApp boasting about the highest ever messages handled in a single day.
The latest claim beats the previous high of 54 billion messages processed in a single day that was set by WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve 2013.
However, these ecstatic claims didn’t last long as the service soon witnessed outages across the globe. Users flocked to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to reveal that they were not able to send and receive messages using the service.
Users started reporting that WhatsApp was showing the following message: “Sorry, our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
WhatsApp is yet to officially announce the outage and its reasons on its site as well as via its WhatsApp Status Twitter account.
This is the second outage for WhatsApp since Facebook acquired the service in February. The previous outage lasted for over 3 hours and it does prove service’s resilience to a great extent, but frequent outages do hamper WhatsApp’s reputation and Zuckerberg will be none too pleased.
