WhatsApp and FaceBook Are Down, Apocalypse is Here

I live in Hong Kong and most of my family and friends are back in India. I have been here for nearly 5 years now.

Before this, I stayed away from India back in 2011, when I was in the US on an exchange semester. Skype was still a thing back then and that is how I connected with family. I still owned a QWERTY phone with an actual keypad.

However, today, all my communication is on WhatsApp and that is how I speak with family too.

So, for the past couple of hours, like millions of other internet users, my wife and I have checked our internet connections 500 times, to no avail.

We even feared that Hong Kong, like China might have banned WhatsApp. Only to find out that FaceBook and its whole ecosytem of apps including Instagram and Whatsapp are out.

It has been a couple of hours at the time of writing this and still no progress.

Are we over reliant on social media? I think the answer is yes.

#1 — We connect with family and friends over apps

Maybe, we need to keep multiple channels of communication open even in this day and age of technology. And no, Telegram is not a backup for Whatsapp, because if the whole internet crashed none of it would work.

#2 — Maybe Remote Work Isn’t Bulletproof

A few days ago there was a Slack outage that affected many businesses that were running on the platform.

In the case of physical offices at least there are other means of communication but not in a fully remote setting.

Maybe there needs to be a backup plan for everything.

There is a lot more to explore and understand and learn from these outages but for another time. For now, let us hope the powers that be fix it all and unpause a million lives.