Call me unreasonable, but if I forked out $19 billion for something, I’d expect it to actually work.
Mark Zuckerberg may have been thinking the same thing Saturday afternoon when WhatsApp – the app he bought last week for the aforementioned sum of money – went down for more than three hours, leaving its 450 million users unable to access the mobile messaging service.
WhatsApp took to Twitter to acknowledge the problem, informing its followers it was trying to sort out “server issues.”
sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.
— WhatsApp Status (@wa_status) February 22, 2014
A couple of hours later and it still wasn’t working, a situation that may have had some users wondering if they should start checking out rival offerings.
As the afternoon wore on, an increasing number of peeved WhatsApp users did what many people do in such situations and jumped on Twitter to express their frustration. Check out the hashtag #whatsappdown for some amusing remarks, among them, “Mark Zuckerberg please do us a favor. Never buy Twitter,” and, “Thanks Zuckerberg for re-uniting families tonight!”
By early evening, the team behind the recently acquired app appeared to have sorted out the issue, tweeting, “WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime,” though precisely why the outage occurred isn’t currently clear.
The downtime is by no means the first for WhatsApp. According to one of its Twitter feeds, the service has been crashing almost once a month since last summer, but with the spotlight fixed firmly on the app in the wake of Facebook’s purchase, this is by far the most embarrassing, and potentially most damaging, of all the outages to date.
