Losing Facebook is bad, but losing WhatsApp is worse

  • Thread starter Thread starter The Verge RSS
  • Start date Start date
T

The Verge RSS

Guest
Author: Ian Carlos Campbell

acastro_210119_1777_whatsapp_0003.0.jpg

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In the chaos of Monday’s Facebook outage, it’s easy to lose sight of the company’s reach. Not being able to post a new photo to Instagram is an annoyance, but it's not necessarily catastrophic. Yet for WhatsApp users, especially outside of the US, losing Facebook’s encrypted messaging service is a life-halting change, and one competing messaging services were eager to capitalize on today.

In February last year, WhatsApp announced it had 2 billion users worldwide. Compare that to original flavor Facebook’s 2.5 billion and it's easy to see how many lives WhatsApp touches. It’s become the default method to contact people in plenty of countries, including around 400 million unique monthly users in India Bloomberg writes. That goes beyond...

Continue reading…

Continue reading...