#WhatsAppDown Was Trending & Everyone Was in a Tizzy

On Sunday, 19^th January WhatsApp was down for some time; media files weren't getting transmitted. The outage led to outrage among the constantly connected. Suddenly everyone was checking their networks, trying to find out if other sites were working and inevitably turning to Twitter to participate in the  #WhatsAppDown hashtag.

Sunday evening this happened with people trying to send messages and media.

But not the media. Needless to say, the receivers were most confused.

Was the story everywhere.

And then try again.

This outage was the first such outage of 2020.

WhatsApp was working in Nigeria – this puzzled a lot of people.

They wanted to check what was going on. The #WhatsAppDown trend reassured them that the problem was not at their end.

The need to be connected to social media is so strong that it transcends loyalty to one or other platform.

Some users, unfamiliar with Twitter tried to make sense of the microblogging platform.

…This. The outage didn’t make a difference to them.

Since Mark Zuckerberg owns WhatsApp, the tweeple promptly trained their sights on him.

Some seemed to forget that Twitter also goes down from time to time.

Some people were facing serious problems --- such as these.

We are all in those groups which we long to exit. But cannot.

There are many social media profiles with that name; which, rather unfortunately, can be easily misinterpreted.

People wanted to know why WhatsApp was down and why it was taking so long for it to get up again.

Some decided to remind the outraged folk about the default situation elsewhere; where not having WhatsApp has been a way of life since 5^th August.

Some decided to give the virtual world a miss in favour of the real world.

Some of the tweeple had other theories about the reason for WhatsApp being down.

This commentator used this meme (Baby Yoda is a blessing for the memers everywhere) to explain the fate of some lonely souls or do I mean lucky souls. Maybe we all need to get off virtual conversations and have real ones? Maybe #WhatsAppDown was actually a good thing since the proliferation of content from WhatsApp University’s Fake News factory was temporarily truncated?