
WhatsApp is down - okgabr
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-new-acquisition-confirms/
======
ChuckMcM
WhatsApp had (depending on who you talk to) about 55 employees at the time of
the acquisition. We learned from Techcrunch that the only investor, Sequoia
had about 20% of the outstanding stock (with everything converted to Commmon).

So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log
function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by
the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That
is roughly $30M per person.

How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around
in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that
settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee
and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in
California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the
interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone
says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that
jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in
Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew
to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..."

It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will
never be the same.

~~~
judk
But their checks haven't cleared yet...

~~~
ChuckMcM
And that is the difference between having been there before, and not having
been there before sadly.

------
okgabr
It seems that people are running towards Telegram: "This is crazy. We'are
getting 100 new registrations every second. Trying hard to prevent connection
issues in Europe."
[https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437313902058426368](https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437313902058426368)

UPDATE: Telegram is already facing connection issues in Europe caused by the
"avalanche" of new users.
[https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360](https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360)

~~~
lmg643
One of the key tenets of Warren Buffett's theory of investment value is based
around "moats" \- businesses that can't easily be replicated. It's impressive
how large WhatsApp has grown but it might be more remarkable how quickly
another service can grow in its place. Barriers to entry are continuously
falling in mobile and tech in general.

~~~
diminish
for messaging, there may be a rule similar to moore's for transistors;

... every 18 months a new messaging platform will be the go-to place.

~~~
sjtgraham
This is pretty ridiculous. Whatsapp solved two important problems. It was the
first non-SMS cross-platform messaging service for mobile (telephone number as
address, etc), and carriers were (and still are) price gouging on SMS pricing.
Whatsapp quickly picked up initial users because of this and growth
accelerated as it benefited from the massive network effects of more and more
users joining the service. It's not clear that Whatsapp has any major problems
as SMS does that would allow an upstart to make a significant incursion into
Whatsapp's user base. Whatsapp also has massive network effect now, the
switching cost seems too high.

~~~
CamperBob2
Counterpoint: as long as these trivial services are attracting $19 billion
valuations, eventually someone is going to do the obvious rational thing, and
pay new users $10 each to switch to their competing service. Lather, rinse,
repeat, until equilibrium is reached.

~~~
robbles
You can pay users to join your service and download your app, but that doesn't
mean they'll become monthly active users, which is the metric your business
will be valued on.

This is a user acquisition tactic like any other - it doesn't get around the
network effect that WhatsApp and others capitalize on to stay in the lead.

~~~
coldtea
> _it doesn 't get around the network effect that WhatsApp and others
> capitalize on to stay in the lead_

I've seen over 5 IM platforms rise and die (ICQ, AOL, MSM, etc), in the last
15 years, so this "network effect" is not that great a barrier...

------
RockyMcNuts
Installing those NSA back doors can be tricky.

~~~
iancarroll
Yet another it-must-be-the-NSA comment.

~~~
gahahaha
They are silly because the NSA obviously already had all the back doors they
wanted. Nothing to do with Facebook.

------
okgabr
Whatsapp tweeted this from 1hr: "sorry we currently experiencing server
issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly."
[https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640](https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640)

------
oliwary
It must be incredibly difficult to turn the whatsapp service back on after an
outage, since most active users have probably sent a message that is waiting
in the queue. Literally hundreds of millions of messages would hit the server
once it goes up. Does anyone know how they handle this?

~~~
lucaspiller
Actually this is the one of the things that annoyed me about WhatsApp - when
it is down or you don't have a connection you can't queue messages to be sent.
I frequent places without phone coverage (e.g. the Tube in London) and this
was one of my big gripes.

On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry"
sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order).
Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.

~~~
oliwary
I'm pretty sure whatsapp does that - just tried sending a message while in
flight mode, it appeared with a little clock to it, indicating it was going to
be sent once back online.

~~~
lucaspiller
Random. It just says 'Connecting' for me.

------
znowi
I've been using Whatsapp for at least 2 years and this is the first outage
that I recall. Might as well be a sudden influx of users.

Although, knowing Zuckerberg, I equally accept all the "conspiracy"
explanations in the thread :)

~~~
theintern
You've been using WA for 2 years and haven't noticed any issues? You obviously
haven't been using it much. Regularly whatsapp has short issues where messages
will not go through, this is just a particularly long one.

~~~
chaz
WA has had issues with delayed messages, too. Not so helpful to get those,
"I'm running 15 minutes late" messages 3 hours later.

~~~
vidarh
As an SMS replacement that doesn't seem too bad - SMS's themselves are
frequently delayed - I've had SMS's delivered more than a day late.

------
PaulHoule
Wow, it wasn't long before Facebook shut them down. ;-)

~~~
gahahaha
These accu-hires are getting out of control. (a little bit of quick math says
that each employee was worth a bit less than 300 million dollars to Facebook.

------
bhaumik
Back up again. 150 min delay

Updated story: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-
facebooks-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-
new-acquisition-confirms/)

------
bowlofpetunias
Looks like they're taking Telegram down with them.

It seems to me that the already massive rate at which WhatsApp users were
fleeing to Telegram has accelerated to the point Telegram can't handle it
anymore either.

------
Freestyler_3
Porting all chats to your public wall takes up some load.

------
DavideNL
Maybe Whatsapp can't handle the massive 'remove account' requests? :-)

~~~
raverbashing
It would be interesting if that was the problem

For example, the "remove account" is not as efficient (for example, there's
extra locking performed), and since removals are thought to be rare nobody
bothered with its performance.

------
level09
it's ironic I was just reading their papers about how they scaled their app

[http://www.erlang-
factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...](http://www.erlang-
factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf)

Strangely, there have no status update so far regarding the issue:

[https://twitter.com/WhatsApp](https://twitter.com/WhatsApp)

~~~
okgabr
[https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640](https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437319926605680640)

~~~
JetSpiegel
That's not the verified account. Might as well be a bot, as far as everyone is
concerned.

~~~
theintern
It's not, but it's linked to from their website, so it's official.
[https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/android/22014642](https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/android/22014642)

------
okgabr
UPDATE: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the
downtime..."
[https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437358172983279616](https://twitter.com/wa_status/status/437358172983279616)

~~~
WaterSponge
Image uploads not working and still no gif support.

------
amaks
They must be upgrading their servers to show ads and forward messages to
facebook servers.

------
cliveowen
They successfully migrated their operations on Facebook's data centers.

------
idleworx
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Kik. It's a great platform, and lots of users
are switching to it now because of this aquisition. I think lots of people who
are privacy conscious will make a move away from WhatsApp/Facebook in the next
few months.

~~~
deft
What about BBM? Kik completely copied BBM (the founder was an ex employee).
BBM is a lot better in many ways, including real groups. Strange seeing BBM
not try and capitalise on this purchase of Whtasapp by Facebook.

------
znowi
It's back online!

~~~
WaterSponge
Text only. No images and still no gif support.

------
zhte415
The elephant in the room is being ignored: Weixin (WeChat)

------
motyar
If you cant beat it, buy it and shut it down.

------
adnam
Upptalk is up :)

------
mindstab
this is a bit weird. it should be unrealted and way too soon for microsoft to
get their hands on it and two data points a pattern does not make, however:
fairly reliable skype had a big outage the WEEK microsoft bought them and now
WhatsApp is having a big outage days after Microsoft bought them. Best case
it's a poor omen.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> two data points a pattern does not make, however WhatsApp is having a big
> outage days after Microsoft bought them.

Um .... Whatsapp were bought by Facebook.

------
pearjuice
Seeing how this will be a thread filled with witty jokes and Telegram fans,
may I ask what Telegram their deal is? They do not intend to generate revenue
yet put so much effort in marketing, securing and even payouts to breaches.
Why? What is the cause? I might be one of these tinfoil hatters to some, but
isn't this fishy? Why spend millions of dollars on yet-another-chatapp which
can literally be replaced within days when a brand new app with some edgy
feature gets out.

 _Why? What is Telegram their deal?_

~~~
tobias2014
The (only/main) advantage of Telegram over Whatsapp is for me: They have an
open API, such that I can get a desktop client. (There is already a
commandline version for linux)

Also in principle there is end-to-end encryption, which is not a reason I
switched. I'm not sure if this feature has been there when the 200k crypto
contest went up with its criticism, but in principle it should be completely
dependent on the client, which is opensource.

Too bad XMPP/Jabber did not get a breakthrough, what is the reason for that?
No user friendly client? Noone putting enough advertising into it; you can't
make money with it?

In germany there is currently a hype of Threema. Every magazine and newspaper
writes about it being secure with end-to-end encryption. Even IT magazines
just write naively about it, ignoring completely that it's closed source and
noone can even see slightly behind the curtains.

I rather prefer to see/know the flaws (Telegram) than use a proprietary
solution that makes the masses "feel" good. See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281338)
Even that Threema costs some money makes people more confident of its
security, with the reasoning that with a free solution you are not a customer
but rather the product and you pay with your data.

~~~
smw
The desktop client/multiple platform thing is so huge, I don't understand why
WhatsApp, for instance, avoids this.

My group of friends uses a lot of iMessage, and I really hate the fact that I
can neither use an iMessage app sitting in front of a Windows/Linux machine,
nor can I use the iMessage app to view/respond to SMS from people who don't
have iOS devices.

Who wants to take your phone out of your pocket and hunt and peck on a tiny
keyboard when you can just type ~80 wpm on the computer in front of you?

~~~
querulous
whatsapp replaces texts for most users. they probably wouldn't read/reply to
messages from their computer even if they could

~~~
smw
Why not? By virtue of my profession, I spend many hours in front of a computer
during the day. Every time I receive a text -- which is pretty often, I'm
wishing I could read respond on the device I'm currently using, instead of
switching screens/keyboards.

What would make someone prefer using the other device?

