For organizations, nothing is more painstaking than a communication outage. From business disruptions to counterproductive downtime, the negative effects of temporarily losing that workspace messaging tool are insurmountable. Yesterday, WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world, displayed a glitch as users were unable to send or receive messages. About 12,000 user reports were made within the first half hour regarding its downtime, and this quickly spiked to 30,000 reports within its 2-hour outage. To make things worse, it’s the longest outage that the platform has ever faced in its 13-year run.
This global blackout not only caused several organizations to put their operations on hold but also frustrated both entrepreneurs and customers alike. The cause of the disruption was simply summed up as a “technical error” by Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp. While the app’s episodic blackout history is relatively rare, about 2 billion users are still globally affected by its unannounced maintenance, leaving companies scratching their heads and forcing them to find other alternatives within those couple of hours. As every business owner knows, time is money, and 120 minutes of downtime could make or break profitability.
