I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west.

At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billions to invest in robust, secure IT infrastructure.

I live in a country where WhatsApp is heavily used for all sorts of things (business communication, personal communication, ordering food from local restaurants, and so on). I was actually surprised by how utterly replaceable it proved to be during this outage. I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least two or three messenger apps installed anyway, and since most work by the phone number, it's pretty seamless to switch to another.

I find phone number systems difficult as I use a classic phone. FB messenger seems to be broken in browser on Android too. So ironically this is hard for me. I had to jump hoops getting signal onto an android. So I am stuck in email. Once xmmp felt usable.

In your country, which messenger did most of you default to?

There's a local one which a lot of people already have installed even if they don't use it most of the time. A lot of people have Telegram installed too. WhatsApp / FB Messenger are the most popular but if they're down, between those two you would have most people covered.

I've never relied on WhatsApp but if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours.

Sure, you could try to contact people some other way (like a regular phone call) but most people don't even bother exchanging phone numbers any more, so you probably wouldn't even have someone's number unless you have their (paper) business card, or if you met them before 2012.

> if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours

Use QQ, of course! (Except that it probably shares infra with WeChat and would be down as well!)

The sad thought crossed my mind: people using Whatsapp to have last calls with family members dying of e.g. COVID, trying terribly to get onto telegram or something but having no luck getting through since everything was degraded.

Kinda ruined the few hours of fun for me.

People dying of COVID are usually heavily sedated with a tube down their tracheae.

They don’t have last words, they either get better or die.

Assuming you have never faced the above situation (and I pray you don't). It goes something like this:

1. on call nurse txts "its time"

2. you confirm that he/she will initiate a call in 20 mins over whatsapp/viber/messenger

3. The nurse holds up the ipad over your loved one's face

4.

That's heartbreaking

In fact, they often have terribly ordinary last words, i.e. whatever they said immediately prior to what they thought was a temporary intubation.

I seriously doubt those people couldn't just call normally instead

In many circumstances, WhatsApp works better -- like, a lot better -- than normal calls. Also it's often subsidized.

They probably could have paid extra money out of pocket to call normally and get a substandard experience.

Normal telecom services do not offer free international calls or video conferencing like WhatsApp. You also would need a sim card and phone plan. WhatsApp just requires wifi.

International calls might be too expensive unfortunately.

The phone call might be right before ventilation rather than last words too.

I imagine that developing countries were affected the worse, although that particular scenario is sad, I can't help but think of all the lost revenue that families/small businesses suffered because this outage.

All of us because thats all anyone talked about today

It would be pretty irresponsible for emergency services to be dependent on WhatsApp or anything of its ilk.

In some countries, you can run out of mobile minutes or data but be on a plan that provides free access to Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram.

Apparently it's widely used within the UK NHS to schedule nursing rotas and suchlike: https://twitter.com/fourhourtarget/status/144512310687657165...

Whatsapp contacts are phone numbers, so you can just call or text them with the phone network instead if it's essential.

Expensive from ZAF to USA tho. Fall back to email was our route.

In many countries people rely on prepaid minutes and data and these plans usually come with free access to FB, Insta and Whatsapp. If their minutes run out they could normally still use Whatsapp

I use whatsapp for ALL my communication, and I got an incredible number of missed calls from family across the ocean because I wasn't answering.

Nothing important, but my parents sure lost some sleep.

I am sure I am one of the few who's live is so unimportant that I can be offline for a day without anyone panicking / loosing lucrative deals / missing once in a live time opportunities, but boy do I feel blessed.

The time I needed to be available as badly as most of you seem today, I carried at least 2 phones, from 2 different providers from 2 different countries and was instructed how to get where in case of a (comms) blackout.

Glad that's over for me, hope you guys are all well.

Slightly offtopic but my ISP has been having issues all over the country, I’ve been down 8 hrs. From the few people who could get customer service they aren’t admitting to any large scale outage either just following the usual “reset your device” script which is suspicious.

My first world problems were greatly exacerbated by Whatsapp being down.

I could not communicate with my in-laws via WhatsApp which meant I actually had to speak to them in person.

I did not even realise it was down till it was over… I ignore my WhatsApp messages for as long as I can usually!

none probably

64828274

Some number less than their active user count?

Ask a leading question; get a flippant answer.

I’d find the cries for empathy to the poor affected users more compelling if it weren’t for the fact that anyone of working age can remember a time when these technologies didn’t exist. If it’s a tragedy that you didn’t have access to a novel technology for six hours, then I’d question the health of your relationship to it, and the wisdom of any economic choices you’ve made which depend upon it.

Wow! Snarky much?

Do you have any experience living in a country outside a "first world" country? Do you have any understanding how these "novel" technologies can be the backbone of people's business, livelihoods or even emergency services?

Sounds like you are in a comfortable bubble.

No I do not. And I’m sorry that the incumbent monopolist in third world countries is such a shit show that anyone has to suffer for their incompetence. Doesn’t change the reality that Facebook is the only game in town in the developing world because they worked very hard to make it that way.

Tell you what: I’ll be more empathetic to victims of the great Facebook outage of 2021 if you can be more empathetic to the mother I lost to covid after refusing to get vaccinated on account of memes she saw on Facebook. Deal?

It was a serious question. I didn't realize so many people relied on WhatsApp for communication outside the US.

I also find your argument specious, because you can continue that train of logic with any modern technology.

I don't think communication is comparable to food and water, but I wouldn't say it's a negligible impact on a person, especially since we don't know the circumstances of what happened during those six hours and how many services rely on it outside of Western nations. And by the looks of it, a few million people rely on it.

Facebook going down is a minor inconvenience. Facebook Chat and WhatsApp going down are a bit more serious.

Indeed. What are the trade offs of technology? Is it actually making our lives better? Are our lives richer for having brought Mark Zuckerberg into them? Perhaps if we had thought to ask those questions ahead of time we wouldn’t be living through a fourth corona virus wave fueled by antivax misinformation, and perhaps people wouldn’t be feeling deep personal injury at being unable to talk to someone for six hours.

I can remember a time when the internet wasn't widely available, and I'm not that old. Are you saying that everyone should just go back to how things were done in 1990, and the only impact would be the fault of the people using it?

I’m saying that anyone that thinks that progress is a given and that we are inherently better off for having the social web may not be giving sufficient considerations to the trade offs we have incurred. On the other hand I’m typing in anger, so I might just be an asshole.

You really were unable to come up with a single example of how this outage could have impacted people’s lives in drastic ways?

I invite you to see life through other people’s eyes every once in a while. I promise it’ll be worth it.

Doesn't matter in this case. If you use fb's platform in any way, deal with it - especially if that's the only straw in use.

People really should have other means and platforms to use and gravitate toward them. There is no good reason to prefer fb for anything.