Slightly offtopic but my ISP has been having issues all over the country, I’ve been down 8 hrs. From the few people who could get customer service they aren’t admitting to any large scale outage either just following the usual “reset your device” script which is suspicious.
Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#22I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west. At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billion…
I live in a country where WhatsApp is heavily used for all sorts of things (business communication, personal communication, ordering food from local restaurants, and so on). I was actually surprised by how utterly replaceable it proved to be during this outage. I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least two or three messenger apps installed anyway, and since most work by the phone number, it's pretty seamless to switch to another.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#23none probably
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#24Whatsapp contacts are phone numbers, so you can just call or text them with the phone network instead if it's essential.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#25I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west. At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billion…
I've never relied on WhatsApp but if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours.
Sure, you could try to contact people some other way (like a regular phone call) but most people don't even bother exchanging phone numbers any more, so you probably wouldn't even have someone's number unless you have their (paper) business card, or if you met them before 2012.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#26I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west. At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billion…
I've never relied on WhatsApp but if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours. Sure, you could try to contact people some other way (like a regular phone call) but most people don't even bother exchanging phone numbers any more, so you probably wouldn't even have someone's number unless you have their (paper) business card, or if you met them befor…
> if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours
Use QQ, of course! (Except that it probably shares infra with WeChat and would be down as well!)
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#27Whatsapp contacts are phone numbers, so you can just call or text them with the phone network instead if it's essential.
Expensive from ZAF to USA tho. Fall back to email was our route.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#28It's a really interesting question.
Some people will die early, some people will live longer because of it.
Often with infrequent outages people will ramp up to fix the issue. So a shorter lunch and physically call people, which is mentally ok because you see it as important (compared to many shorter lunches which will reduce life span)
Lets say Facebook and Co saves 100,000 lives a year, then 4 hour outage = 45 lives. With the increase in short term productivity, maybe you'd halve it. 20 lives lost?
I think 100,00 lives (10,000,000 human years) a year saved by Facebook is reasonable. Maybe you could times that by 10, 100? It could be a very significant factor on the planet. I doubt Facebook would be negative. Does "Woke" and "Fake News" hurt more than Facebook helps, I find it unlikely.
I think the greater question is how many lives are saved by Facebook each year. It's very complex. When a market place (like literally Facebook Marketplace) temporarily goes down how much money/assets are actually lost, lost. A human life is worth around $300,000 to $3 million depending on location, that's somewhat fungible in the location.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#29I think the most surprising thing to me in these comments is the lack of awareness of how real people in the real world communicate with each other in countries outside of the west. At the end of the day, Whatsapp is reliable communication infrastructure and it does get used for all sorts of critical things. It's also a backbone for commerce in many parts of the world. Believe it or not, not every country has billion…
I live in a country where WhatsApp is heavily used for all sorts of things (business communication, personal communication, ordering food from local restaurants, and so on). I was actually surprised by how utterly replaceable it proved to be during this outage. I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least two or three messenger apps installed anyway, and since most work by the phone number, it's pretty seamless to s…
I find phone number systems difficult as I use a classic phone. FB messenger seems to be broken in browser on Android too. So ironically this is hard for me. I had to jump hoops getting signal onto an android. So I am stuck in email. Once xmmp felt usable.
Re: Ask HN: How many lives have been negatively affected by WhatsApp going down?
#30I use whatsapp for ALL my communication, and I got an incredible number of missed calls from family across the ocean because I wasn't answering.
Nothing important, but my parents sure lost some sleep.