WhatsApp’s temporary global outage

On Tuesday 22nd Jan 2019 the Facebook owned WhatsApp suffered an issue with its services, leaving thousands of users in dismay.

According to outage report numerous users faced this outage and some still seem to be encountering issues sending and receiving messages. The reports have come from far and wide, from the United Kingdom to Canada, Singapore to Mexico, and various other regions. Many of these users quickly took to Twitter, using #WhatsAppdown to check that they weren’t the only ones affected, to find they weren’t alone.

While only a temporary loss of connectivity occurred for WhatsApp, Multitone communication products did not face the same challenges. Multitone’s communications and messaging solutions do not rely on a single platform or communications pathway, instead we use a combination of technologies, and networks, to ensure the delivery of critical messaging.

This means that our systems can offer a more secure solutions that are unlikely to be affected if a similar event happens again, our products can be operated via dedicated or virtualised hardware and are not dependant on cloud-based services meaning they are independent from single points of failure. This is a vital aspect, especially to businesses or individuals who immediately rely on quick communications to operate every day. Multitone also offers back up options for businesses, as our products and hardware come with intelligent clustering built in which means they can recover if a fault occurs, resulting in a quick solution and automatic resolution to all problems.

Though there has yet to be an explanation from WhatsApp to say what may have caused this temporary crash, we at Multitone feel it should make business’s reconsider their options and what back up alternatives are offered if their communication systems go down.