WhatsApp Outages on Friday and Saturday Instigate Various Conspiracy Theories

WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app for smartphones, has faced outage many times in the past due to the heavy load, but this prolonged breakdown on Friday and Saturday has been taken quite suspiciously as Facebook bought the messaging app last week.

Facebook, which happens to be one of the most popular social networking websites of the world, acquired WhatsApp at a mindboggling price of $19 billion.

Over the last couple of years, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has shown inclination to buy many social websites or apps such as Instagram but the purchase of WhatsApp has to be top of the list, considering the ever-growing popularity of the smartphone app.

Web analysts believe that WhatsApp’s popularity had a significant effect on Facebook, with more and more people looking to use the messaging service instead of Facebook inbox.

The app remained unavailable during different times on Friday and Saturday, raising concerns among millions of users spread around the globe.

WhatsApp users expressed their concerns through their social networking accounts on Twitter and Facebook, many coming up with different conspiracy theories regarding Facebook’s intentions behind taking control of the messaging app.

However, WhatsApp management made it clear immediately through the company’s Twitter account that they were facing server issues and promised to recover as soon as possible. The company also made it clear that there was nothing alarming or new behind the breakdown as WhatsApp has experienced such issues at least once a month during the last seven months.

Frustrated by the outage, many WhatsApp users did not hesitate to criticize Jim Koum and Alex Fishman, the co-founders of the app, for being too busy in enjoying the newly-found riches. Countless users are not happy with Facebook’s acquisition of the messaging service as they believe that the quality of WhatsApp will suffer as a result.

Another school of thought emerged after the app’s collapse on the weekend, believing that many new users would have downloaded WhatsApp on their smartphones as it made headlines after being bought by an extremely popular social networking website and consequently having an adverse effect on the services of the app.

According to recent reports of Business Insider, WhatsApp already has more than 400 million active users all around the globe, 100 million more than its closest competitor, WeChat. Line is on the third spot with more than 186 million users. It remains to be seen what kind of an effect Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp will have on the rival messaging apps, which will be desperate to upgrade their services to catch the attention of those WhatsApp users who are not happy with its merger with the social networking website.

The number one messaging app has been working fine since the last suspension of services on Saturday morning, which should be a sigh of relief for WhatsApp lovers.

Apart from allowing users to send free and unlimited text messages to other Whatsapp users, people can share photos, videos and even send recorded voice messages through the service. The attractiveness of WhatsApp has also affected the sales of many cellular service providers in different parts of the world.