Shortly after 1 pm Bangladesh time on Tuesday, 25 October 2022, WhatsApp stopped. Messages hung on a single grey tick, groups went silent, and the web and desktop versions showed "connecting" without connecting. It came back on phones around 3 pm and on the web a little later. In between, thousands of users reported the failure to Downdetector, the site that tracks outages, and Twitter filled with the usual jokes about people talking to their families.
What Meta said
Not much. The company acknowledged that "some people" had trouble sending messages, apologised, and later attributed the failure to a technical error on its side, without saying what. There was no sign of a cyber-attack, despite speculation; large services fall over most often because of a bad configuration change, which was also the cause of the six-hour Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp blackout of 4 October 2021.
Why two hours matters here
WhatsApp has about 2.5 billion users worldwide, and in Bangladesh it has become the working channel for garment buyers and factories, e-commerce sellers and their customers, remittance families and the entire freelance economy talking to clients in other time zones. A two-hour silence in the middle of a working day is not an inconvenience; it is lost orders. It is also an argument, made every time this happens and forgotten every time, for not running a business on a single free app.
Is it them or is it you?
- Check Downdetector (downdetector.com) or search Twitter for "WhatsApp down". If thousands of people are reporting the same thing in the same hour, it is not your phone.
- Try another service. If Messenger, Telegram or a web page loads normally, your internet is fine.
- Do not reinstall the app. During an outage, reinstalling risks losing chats that have not been backed up, and it will not help.
- Do not change your password or number on the assumption you were hacked.
- Wait. Global outages are fixed in one to six hours. Use SMS or a call for anything urgent.
For businesses
Keep a second channel your customers know about, a phone number and an e-mail address on the Facebook page and the packaging, and keep the order list somewhere other than the chat history. WhatsApp will go down again; the question is whether your business does with it.
The single point of failure most shops have
A great many small businesses in Bangladesh run entirely inside WhatsApp: the catalogue is a photo album, the order book is a chat thread, the customer list is the contact list, and the payment confirmation is a bKash screenshot in the same conversation. When the app stops, every one of those stops at once.
The fix is not to abandon it, because it works and customers are already there. It is to make sure nothing exists only inside it. Keep the customer list somewhere else — a spreadsheet, a notebook, anywhere — so you can still reach people. Keep the day’s orders written down outside the chat. Have a second contact route your customers already know, whether that is a phone number on a Facebook page or a printed card.
Two hours of outage is an inconvenience for a person and a closed shop for a business that kept everything in one place.
