This highly illustrated a point for me this morning.
My oldest friend is in a foreign country and has no support network. He left his job yesterday and was overall having a terrible day. He desperately needed me to call him, and WhatsApp has been our primary contact medium since he left the US.
Fast forward to this morning and literally in between “I’ll call you in a few minutes” while I was finishing up morning stuff, WhatsApp suddenly switched to “Connecting…”.
Error messages that appeared were generally along the lines of “you aren’t connected to the internet” although clearly I was.
Meanwhile I was completely separated from my buddy who needed someone to talk to. Until news popped up that FB was having issues I had no idea what was happening.
Personally this reflects poorly on WhatsApp’s design. The error messages don’t make sense and are inconsistent. Clearly their devs aren’t testing for this situation.
More alarmingly, it initially looked like chat was working during the outage. I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I sent sent multiple chat messages that locally appeared to go through while the video/audio connect options were hidden by the “Connecting…” text.
Luckily email still works and I was able to get confirmation my friend was ok, and we had a good lengthy conversation a few hours ago once FB systems came back up.
My oldest friend is in a foreign country and has no support network. He left his job yesterday and was overall having a terrible day. He desperately needed me to call him, and WhatsApp has been our primary contact medium since he left the US.
Fast forward to this morning and literally in between “I’ll call you in a few minutes” while I was finishing up morning stuff, WhatsApp suddenly switched to “Connecting…”.
Error messages that appeared were generally along the lines of “you aren’t connected to the internet” although clearly I was.
Meanwhile I was completely separated from my buddy who needed someone to talk to. Until news popped up that FB was having issues I had no idea what was happening.
Personally this reflects poorly on WhatsApp’s design. The error messages don’t make sense and are inconsistent. Clearly their devs aren’t testing for this situation.
More alarmingly, it initially looked like chat was working during the outage. I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I sent sent multiple chat messages that locally appeared to go through while the video/audio connect options were hidden by the “Connecting…” text.
Luckily email still works and I was able to get confirmation my friend was ok, and we had a good lengthy conversation a few hours ago once FB systems came back up.