Network router caused WhatsApp’s ‘biggest’ outage

Farhan Abro June 22, 2014

Less than a minute

NEW YORK: WhatsApp founder Jan Koum on Sunday issued an apology and blamed a network router for Saturday’s outage of the mobile messaging app.

“We are sorry about the downtime,” wrote Koum. “It has been our longest and biggest outage in years. It was caused by a network router fault which cascaded into our servers.”

“We worked with our service provider on resolving the issue and making sure it will not happen again.”

WhatsApp was down for more than three hours on Saturday just days after Facebook (FB.O) bought it for $19 billion.

The five-year old company currently has about 450 million users worldwide and is the leading smartphone-based messaging app..

–REUTERS

Farhan Abro

Hello! My name is Farhan Abro, and I'm based here in Islamabad. My journey in Pakistan's digital media really kicked off when I founded INCPak back in 2012. We built it from the ground up, driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, to be a trusted voice for independent journalism. But while media is a big part of who I am, I'm also shaped by a fascinating mix of other passions. I'm deeply into automotive, which gives me a technical edge, but I also find my artistic expression through landscape photography and music. And I'm always diving into the exciting world of Artificial Intelligence. Bringing all these different worlds together the technical, the creative, the journalistic, and the entrepreneurial—it really colors how I see things and approach every project. It gives me a distinct perspective that I try to bring to everything I share