[German]If you're a user of the WhatsApp messenger service and nothing is working right now, it's not because of your device or your account. Meta subsidiary WhatsApp is likely to experience a worldwide outage of its Messenger service today, October 25, 2022.
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German blog reader Gerold left this comment, pointing out an outage of WhatsApp service. Users notice in their WhatsApp app that they cannot connect to the service. On sites like allestoerungen.de (German) or downdetector (English), there is a note that the outage started around 8:00 a.m. (UTC), but is already subsiding.
I looked on Twitter – there is nothing about an outage on WhatsApp's official channel. Yes, thanks to Twitter, WhatsApp users get the information that it also affects others. It's stuff for Memes.
Officially, there is still a lot of guesswork about what might have broken – but an insider sent me the following picture. A technician looks helplessly into a server cabinet and tries to figure out which cable the cleaners might have accidentally pulled out while "cleaning WhatsApp messages" …
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The good news (thanks to the insider who send that picture), however, is that Mark Zuckerberg was seen going to the server room in person – armed with some patch cables – to fix the problem.
Always brings back associations for me when I was on call 37 years ago to be able to intervene in the event of computer failures in production, even at night and on weekends. Fortunately, it always went well – there was no WhatsApp anymore at that time – and in one case I found out that the shift management had put the affected computers into "safe mode" in the event of a malfunction, so that an electrolysis cell couldn't produce a 300,000 amp short circuit (the plant manager's original comment: "The people wanted to let you sleep, the safety mode that their people have programmed works so well that intervention is still sufficient during the day." – was noble, of course). The WhatsApp technicians probably don't have this option – it's nighttime in the U.S. and people are likely to rotate.
Tom Warren writes in the above tweet that WhatsApp (meta) says: "We're aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we're working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as soon as possible." So if WhatsApp is jerky on your end, count yourself among the select group of "some people" who are affected – is then something of a knighthood – out of millions of WhatsApp users, you are the chosen ones. What the reason for the failure is and when it will be fixed remains in the dark – perhaps lost in the meta-verse. Since WhatsApp outages are quite rare, the glitch should be fixed soon, I guess quite optimistically. Although, downdetector and allestoerungen also show disruptions for Facebook and other meta services – although Facebook is currently available for me.
