from Hacker News

WhatsApp goes down for users globally

by tomalpha on 10/25/22, 8:16 AM with 220 comments

  • by chagaif on 10/25/22, 9:19 AM

    Time to talk about matrix.org and Element not Signal and definitely not Telegram...

  • by detaro on 10/25/22, 8:18 AM

  • by taspeotis on 10/25/22, 9:25 AM

    I don’t think there’s a status page for WhatsApp, but Meta has this for the business side of things: https://metastatus.com/whatsapp-business-api

  • by dustedcodes on 10/25/22, 9:41 AM

    Even though I do have WhatsApp I wouldn't have noticed without this HN headline.

    Everyone I message with is via iMessage or Signal nowadays and I only have WhatsApp because I am part of a few sports clubs which have a WhatsApp group but we don't chat enough for me to notice a downtime like today.

    Makes me happy to see how I've actually managed to rid myself of WhatsApp for the most part.

  • by seydor on 10/25/22, 8:45 AM

    Thankfully there is still email, which never went down globally

  • by sMarsIntruder on 10/25/22, 10:24 AM

    That's why centralization is bad, especially for now-become critical services such as WA.

  • by KoftaBob on 10/25/22, 8:38 AM

    Seems like a good time to plug Session: https://getsession.org/

    Open source, doesn't require a phone number, and a big strength is that it's decentralized, which makes it much less vulnerable to outages like this.

    "Session utilises the decentralised Oxen Service Node Network to store and route messages. This means that unlike P2P messaging applications you can message Session users when they are offline. This network consists of community operated nodes which are stationed all over the world. Service nodes are organised into collections of small co-operative groups called swarms.

    Swarms offer additional redundancy and message delivery guarantees even if some service nodes become unreachable. By using this network, Session doesn’t have a central point of failure, and Session’s creators have no capacity to collect or store personal information about people using the app"

  • by smithcoin on 10/25/22, 10:31 AM

    Coincidental timing for me- anecdotally I noticed a few WhatsApp commercials during the Monday Night Football game last evening. Meta was hyping up how its end to end encrypted. That’s the first time I have seen national tv adverting for WhatsApp. There also were commercials for Meta’s new headsets so maybe it was part of a larger spend.

  • by jve on 10/25/22, 11:50 AM

    Wife just received account registration sms that new device has been registered. Anyone else experiencing that? Error? Worse?

  • by skc on 10/25/22, 8:49 AM

    Yep, actually enjoying the lack of notifications right now.

    Though for my closest friends and family we still have Signal as backup.

  • by Synaesthesia on 10/25/22, 9:28 AM

    It's back for me personally in South Africa.

  • by dividebyhero on 10/25/22, 8:57 AM

    Works for me with VPN but not without

  • by vardump on 10/25/22, 8:52 AM

    Works again now, at about 08:46 UTC.

  • by quados on 10/25/22, 8:58 AM

    Seems to work on desktop, doesn’t sync with mobile though

  • by saivamsisuru99 on 10/25/22, 8:48 AM

    right may be the server down or maintenance..all over the globe issue is raising

  • by jdlyga on 10/25/22, 2:21 PM

    I'm amazed people still use WhatsApp. We mostly abandoned it in the United States back in the mid 2010's. I mostly use it with friends over in european countries, just like I do with people in China with WeChat.