WhatsApp and Facebook Celebrate Deal With Hours of Downtime

Both WhatsApp and Facebook have some serious egg on their faces today following an extended outage to the WhatsApp service.

Earlier in the week, Facebook shocked practically everyone by announcing that they were buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion ($4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units). WhatsApp is a rapidly growing instant messaging service for smartphones that runs on a number of different platforms. Facebook, which has been on a tremendous run over the past 12 months, used some of their rapidly growing market cap to secure the single biggest purchase in their history - WhatsApp. The deal was seen as a defensive move for Facebook, as WhatsApp’s rapidly growing user base posed one of the single greatest risks to Facebook as a company. Hundreds of millions of people use WhatsApp every month, and nearly 20 billion messages are sent using the application every day.

The markets were initially jittery about the price of the deal, as shares of Facebook dipped almost 5% after the deal was announced. However, a number of analysts concluded that WhatsApp was a smart buy for Facebook, despite the cost, and shares of Facebook ended up quickly recovering.

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Just days after the Facebook/WhatsApp deal was announced, the WhatsApp service went down for an extended period of time.

As a matter of fact, the service is STILL down as of the time that this article was published and has been unavailable for the past couple of hours.

Some people are speculating that WhatsApp has buckled under a crush of new traffic as a result of the Facebook deal. Whatever the reason, this outage is making both Facebook and WhatsApp look really bad.

Filed under: General Knowledge