For a homesick student contemplating candy and canned beans for dinner every other night, it was a pretty good deal. At the time, it operated on a subscription model: In some countries, it cost roughly $1 to download, equivalent to the cost of a handful of international text messages. I first downloaded the app when I moved away for college in 2008, six years before it was acquired by Facebook, for a whopping $19 billion. Here, WhatsApp is more than just “social media”: It’s a public utility.
But it meant something else in the large swaths of the developing world. For lots of people in the U.S., the outage merely stopped them from posting food photos on Instagram and instigating mask arguments on Facebook.
Sometimes, despite being thousands of miles away from my family, my WhatsApp groups seem like the rooms of my childhood house: Here is my mother in one corner, fretting over my father’s cavalier attitude toward the pandemic here is an uncle nobody likes, talking about some secret conspiracy against Islam here are my cousins sending voice notes laced with laughter, virtually re-creating a summer sleepover here is my grandmother, reminding me to pray.įor about five hours, as the Facebook empire-including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp-experienced a global outage, that engine sputtered to a stop for me and billions of others. For me, WhatsApp is as much a verb as Google, and the platform is the engine that fuels my personal and professional lives. Before WhatsApp went dark yesterday, the last messages I sent were to my editor in London, my doctor here in Mexico City, and to the family group chat, asking whether my father-recovering from COVID-19 back home in Pakistan-had finally tested negative.
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