WhatsApp outage takes a toll on small businesses

On Tuesday, popular Meta-owned messaging service, WhatsApp, went out of service for one hour — sending small businesses that are increasingly reliant on the platform into a limbo. While Meta acknowledged the incident, the company did not offer an explanation for the downtime. According to industry experts, such conditions could be increasingly common as small ventures grow increasingly reliant on platforms to distribute their services.

While WhatsApp is yet to reveal the reason, users who have started increasingly relying on the platform for their ventures faced the heat. The platform went down at around 12:30pm IST on October 25, with the number crossing 30,000 by by 1PM, according to DownDetector, a website that tracks such outages on tech platforms.

Kolkata-based baker, Pooja Kaur, ended up having to call users manually to procure client locations for orders. A larger impact was noted by Mumbai-based Sanjay Das, senior claims manager at Max Life Insurance, who noted that the outage caused the day's work schedule to get delayed — and even postponed to the next day.

“We have internal reporting plus client meetings on some important policy coverage and all those communications happen on WhatsApp,” Das said.

The Meta-owned instant messaging platform has over 450 million active users in India, and nearly a third of its WhatsApp Business users are also based here.

A senior executive, who requested anonymity since he works for a competing service, said that while the outages among big tech companies are not very frequent, occasional outages are inevitable. “The nature of technology is such that even when you have redundancies in place, which all major tech companies do, there will be downtimes that affect users and services," he said.

The executive added that losses for independent ventures may amount to a few hundred dollars, which generally run into thousands for bigger firms. However, given the infrequent nature of these outages, it may not always make sense for companies to adopt multiple business platforms to ply their trades.

In India, affected regions based on the website’s map include major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Lucknow, among others, as analysts believe this could be the case of ‘partial disruption’, wherein some users are not being able to send or receive messages on the messaging platform.

"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today," a Meta spokesperson said, adding that the company had fixed the issue and it "apologises for any inconveniences".

This is not the first time WhatsApp has suffered outages in India either. On January 19, 2020, the social messaging service faced a major outage in several parts of the world, including India. Down Detector said it had received close to 4,000 reports from India, the United Kingdom, France, Singapore, Malaysia, and 106 other countries. The services resumed within a few hours. Again, on October 4, 2021 WhatsApp, (along with Instagram and Facebook) faced an outage in several parts for the world, including India. According to Down Detector, 40% users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22% had problems with the web version.

As such, tech glitches and outages (often called downtime) are becoming a regular phenomenon, which can have a significant impact on the reputation and bottom line. On August 24 this year, Facebook reported issues with their feed and it hit celebrities, like Tom Cruise, Rihanna, Sachin Tendulkar, Gordon Ramsay, Deepika Padukone, Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles and others' Facebook walls with random messages and memes from their fans. In India too, users started complaining about the issues around 10 am. 

As per Down Detector, 43% of users have reported issues with the app, 40% relating to the newsfeed and 16% relating to the website in general.

On August 10, micro-blogging site Twitter was down for a brief period, affecting nearly 40,000 users worldwide, even though the social media platform said that they have “fixed the issue”. Same week, Alphabet’s Google services faced a brief outage, affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including India. On July 21, Microsoft’s Teams app faced a major outage with more than 4,000 users saying that they were unable to access or leverage any features on the app.

The WhatsApp outage is also the latest among multiple outages of global platforms such as Facebook, Google and content delivery network (CDN) provider, Cloudflare.

On August 8, an erroneous internal software update caused Google's Search, Maps, Gmail and Images — among the most used services around the world — to stop working. Any search query returned a '502' error, typically designated for an issue for a user network to connect with a platform's server. Emails and navigation were also inaccessible for hours, including in India.

A Google spokesperson later confirmed the issue, adding that the company "worked quickly" to fix the outage.

Prior to this, on June 21, Cloudflare, which powers a number of popular websites and services including Discord and BharatPe, saw its clients experience downtime due to a wrongly configured network that made its servers inaccessible in many regions around the world.

A similar outage occurred with Facebook itself in October last year, when a wrong command by a system engineer suspended the company's access to its data centers.