Innovation
WhatsApp's embarrassing WhatsDown moment
How do you prove yourself when you're a chat company that's little known outside the tech world and Facebook has just acquired you for $19 billion? You allow your system to crash for two hours!
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![Oops PRwatchDotOrg.jpg](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/02/25/b016361e-1c3e-4a6e-8c5c-91806a39f59f/Oops PRwatchDotOrg.jpg)
WhatsApp users would have been lucky to even see this on Saturday.
You allow your system to crash for two hours, of course!
That's what happened to WhatsApp on Saturday, when its servers buckled a couple days after the Facebook largess, and it had to deny service to any of its supposedly 450 million users who tried to use it, The Independent reported.
In case you're still catching on: "Chat apps" are apps (I'll assume you know what those are by now) that allow smartphone users to tap messages to each other and, depending on the app, can support various multimedia functions including photos, videos, voice calls and group discussions, The Next Web explained.
As I wrote last spring, chat apps have overtaken text messaging in popularity. Not only can they do more than a text message can, they also avoid text messaging fees, although they are not necessarily free. WhatsApp charges nothing for the first year and then a nominal 99 cents annual fee, Bloomberg noted in a story today from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that WhatsApp is worth more than the $19 billion than his company paid for it.
In Zuckerberg's view, WhatsApp helps his social media sensation grow because it picks up Facebook's presence in the mobile world - on phones and tables as opposed to on more traditional computers - at a time when overall user growth at Facebook is slowing. The company now claims to have over a billion users, which would be a staggering one-seventh of the planet's population.
“Already almost half-a-billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging and it’s the most engaging app we’ve ever seen exist on mobile by far," Zuckerberg said in Barcelona.
When people can use it, that is.
Image is from PRWatch.org
More on what's up with WhatsApp:
- WhatsApp jumping into Internet phone biz
- Facebook acquires WhatsApp in $19bn deal
- The rise and $23 billion fall of text messaging
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com