WhatsApp CEO breaks silence after hours-long outage
By Muhammad JuniadPublished On 05 Jan 2023
After the most-used smartphone messaging application, WhatsApp, suffered an outage of hours, its CEO, Will Cathcart, announced the restoration of the messaging app, saying WhatsApp is "back up and running."
Facebook-owned social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook itself, suffered an outage at around 8:30pm PST around the globe. These platforms came back online at around 4am PST after over a seven-hour blackout.
"We're entirely back up and running now," said the WhatsApp CEO in a tweet on Tuesday. "We know that people were unable to use WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today -- a humbling reminder of how much people and organisations rely on our app every day."
We're entirely back up and running now. We know that people were unable to use @WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today -- a humbling reminder of how much people and organizations rely on our app every day.
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) October 5, 2021
We take our mission seriously, and I'm grateful to everyone who worked hard to bring our service back with the reliability you expect from @WhatsApp. We'll learn and grow from this, and continue working to provide you with a simple, secure, and reliable private messaging app.
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) October 5, 2021
Cathcart said his company takes its mission quite seriously. In the tweet, he thanked his team members for their efforts in reinstating the operation of the service. "I'm grateful to everyone who worked hard to bring our service back with the reliability you expect from WhatsApp," he said.
"We'll learn and grow from this, and continue working to provide you with a simple, secure, and reliable private messaging app."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also reacted to the disruption of services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He apologised to users of the services and announced the restoration of their operations.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Taking to Twitter, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer also offered an apology and in a later tweet, he announced the gradual restoration of Facebook.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Downdetector, which offers the real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services, showed that the WhatsApp outage was reported at 8:23pm (Pakistan Standard Time) and it shot up to 17,659 complaints by 9:06pm.
Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
The website mentioned that the Instagram outage was reported first at 7:59pm, while Facebook went down almost around the same time.
WhatsApp last went down in March and was restored some hours later, however, the reason for the outage was not officially announced by the company. Photo-sharing app Instagram had also gone down earlier this month and was stored after some hours.
