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.
The majority of organizations treat WhatsApp as more than just an internal messaging platform for brief updates and casual chit-chat. Most entrepreneurs rely heavily on the app to close deals, upsell products, answer inquiries, and take customer orders. From clients dropping pin locations, seeking product information, to delivery transit details, its downtime left business owners and clients standing still while waiting for its service resumption. A similar outage occurred exactly a year ago with the app, greatly hitting the trading assets sector – from oil to cryptocurrency, causing significant headaches to traders all over the world.
As business owners quickly hunt for better alternatives, the smarter ones already have an existing, bulletproof messaging platform in place: Spike.
Why Users Are Switching to Spike
Founded in 2020, Spike’s mission is to turn business communication into simple conversations, so teams can work seamlessly with clients and fellow members. In a nutshell, the app works, looks, and feels like a messenger for the entire team. As the first collaborative email platform, it empowers businesses of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate in order to hit goals and boost productivity together.
Not only is it a chat platform, but it also integrates your email conversations into one. It optimizes internal and external team workspace communications by combining email, chat, channels, and video calls. Simply put, it gives all the tools a team needs in one synchronized, simple, and powerful tool, easily used on mobile, desktop, and web. What’s more, it has zero record of outages. In fact, about 1.3 million users have already upgraded their email experience with Spike, including renowned brands like Philips, Shopify, Fiverr, Sephora, Zoom, and Zillow.
It’s not just the WhatsApp Blackout Effect that made organizations rethink their communication platform. The truth is Gmail also had its fair share of downtime. In fact, Google experienced a major international interruption back on August 9, which simultaneously affected its entire dashboard – Gmail included. With about 1.8 billion users, the possibility of another Gmail outage would simply be catastrophic.
For businesses, the outage of two communication giants is far too risky. Forward-thinking companies know that the next best step is to transition to a trusted messaging app that combines both Gmail and WhatsApp capabilities with zero histories of interruption.