Just the other day Facebook announced that they would be acquiring WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion dollars, and then it seems that just a few days later, WhatsApp goes down in what they’re calling their longest and biggest outage. To be specific, WhatsApp had gone down for about a total of four hours. Four hours might not seem too long for regular users but as we can see based on the result of aftermath of the BBM outage back in 2011, interruption in messaging services can sometimes prove to be a very big deal, especially if you’re a business that relies heavily on the service for your communications.
That being said, WhatsApp’s CEO, Jan Koum, has since come forward to issue an apology for the outage, stating that, “It has been our longest and biggest outage in years and affected all of our users.” According to Kuom, the reason behind the outage is apparently due to a faulty network router that caused a cascading failure that affected the WhatsApp servers. Further details about the problem were not elaborated on, but whatever the case it seems to have nothing to do with the publicity that WhatsApp has been gaining over Facebook’s acquisition of the company. Kuom has also promised that the company is now taking additional measures to ensure that this will not happen again.