WhatsApp is down globally, it’s not your phone.

by Enock Bett · Published January 19, 2020 · Updated January 19, 2020

Messaging app WhatsApp is currently down globally. Starting at around 12 PM users were not able to send any messages such as photos, videos or PDF Files. Thousands of users around the World reported problems complaining that they could not be able to send any media message. I was also trying to send a photo and realized it kept showing ‘Failed’, I thought it was my phone and immediately restarted it.

The reboot could not, however, solve the issue. So I tried using WhatsApp Web on my PC but the problem was the same. Logging in to my Twitter page, I was relieved when I saw several tweets complaining about the same. The company has not yet publicly acknowledge the issue. This is the latest in a series of outages to hit the messaging platform, with a major incident in March 2019 which left users offline for nearly an entire day.

Recently Facebook which owns the giant messaging app, WhatsApp, announced that the messaging platform will start to show Status ads this year. Facebook announced this during its annual Marketing Summit in the Netherlands. The ads on WhatsApp will take up the entire screen as they do on Instagram when you click on them. The ads will pop up on your screen as you browse through your friends’ statuses.

The name of the company will show up on the ads just like when you click on status and your friend’s name appear. What is not clear, however, is the data that Facebook will use to customize their advertisements for their users. I will of course not connect with a USA Starbucks advertisement and I wouldn’t want any that doesn’t relate to me to appear on my timeline. So what kind of data will Facebook use apart from the country code?

READ: The three most irritating WhatsApp Problems

WhatsApp is currently working on a feature that would enable its users to set a self-destruct time limit for the messages they send to their friends. Meaning after the elapse of the set time, the messages sent would disappear completely as if they never existed. Now since people have developed other applications that allow them to revoke ‘delete for everyone’ messages and deleted statuses, it will be interesting to see whether other apps that would revoke the disappeared messages would be created.

WhatsApp is also working on a dark theme and a feature to hide muted status updates completely rather than showing them at the bottom of viewed status in grey. Facebook continues to work on very interesting features. The ads they’re about to put on our screens, however, will be a bad idea for us, but a very profitable business venture for the company considering more than one billion people are on WhatApp and will be able to interact with the ads on a personal level.

Zuckerberg acquired WhatsApp in February 2014 for $19 billion after determining that the app was possibly going to kill Facebook Messenger and consequently bring down to its knees his entire company.