Oops, WhatsApp did it again

CHENNAI: One of the world’s most popular messaging apps WhatsApp went down for more than two hours on Tuesday.

As many as 28,000 reports of outage had been registered online in the matter of just one hour. The global outage threw netizens into a tizzy that manifested on Twitter with all kinds of memes.

For the 40 crore users across India for whom WhatsApp has literally turned into a ‘first thing in the morning, last thing at night’ affair, there was nothing even remotely funny about the outage, which was the result of a technical snag.

On Wednesday, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) directed Meta to file a report on WhatsApp’s outage to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, a nodal agency under it.

The Meta-owned app has evolved significantly beyond its original use-case. The instant messenger, a mainstay of internet based communication in the early years of the millennium, thanks to vendors like Yahoo! and MSN, had graduated to the device of the future – the smartphone.

Due to its ease of use, the platform endeared itself to a cross section of users, and abusers as well.

The platform had run into major troubles in India where the government slapped it with several restrictions on account of the possibility of it being used as a means of spreading hatred, misinformation and divisive narratives.

Just this week, the Centre filed an affidavit in the Delhi High Court stating that as WhatsApp is a foreign company, it cannot invoke fundamental rights under Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution or challenge the constitutionality of a law in India.

In May this year, the company had filed a lawsuit in the Delhi HC against the Indian government, in an attempt to block the traceability clause in the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

As per these roles, any social media platform with a user base exceeding 5 mn users is mandated to disclose the first source or originator of information, if required by local law enforcement authorities.

The platform has now branched out into the payments space too, with its peer-to-peer money transfer option facilitated by the UPI. It would be foolhardy to deem platforms like WhatsApp as a purely communication oriented technology.

In fact, earlier this week, the Competition Commission of India fined Google Rs 9 bn ($113 mn) for anti-competitive practices, in the second such penalty that has been slapped on the company in less than a span of a week.

The regulator had accused the enterprise of taking advantage of its dominance on the app store to force app makers to use its in-app payment system.

The fact remains that barely a handful of companies today are part of the Big Tech ecosystem and are in charge of the data of billions of people the world over.

And while on the outside, it might appear like most of these services are for free, those in the know of things are aware that if you’re not paying for a commodity, then most likely, you are the commodity.

In the case of Big Tech, subscribers are essentially the wellspring of reams of personal data, which becomes fodder for targeted advertising. And all it takes is a two hour outage to prove how utterly dependent we are on these few companies that dominate the tech world.

The WhatsApp outage is a timely reminder of why it might be necessary to spread out our risks, and encourage more innovation in this sphere for new players to emerge.