Whatsapp service availability.

By Jorge García Carnicero

Whatsapp is the mobile application that has been adopted faster by most messaging users, becoming essential in a short period of time. Beyond the typical messaging functions, sending messages to groups of users has been established as the most common way to communicate between people, specifically when using the telematics platforms to coordinate activities of the real life.

Last February, 22nd, Whatsapp suffered one of the most important outages of its history, or at least it was the outage that affected a greatest number of users. A big amount of users didn't realize the service unavailability until about 7:30 pm., loosing their communications with their virtual environment without having an alternative way. But why?, because there are a lot of alternatives: SMS, Line, Telegram, Skipe and applications that are part of bigger systems, like Facebook Messenger or Google Hangouts. Because not all user though on the same alternative and two parts are required to establish a communication. The easiest solutions for most users was to make a telephone call.

Further than the panic and anxiety attacks suffered by some users, the analysis of the outage of Whatsapp from a business continuity perspective must be done taking into account that Whatsapp is becoming a real communications provider.

There are a lot of self-employed and SME that are using Whatsapp as a communications channel with their customers, making advertising with the green logo of the messaging company. It brings the company a modern branding  and a feeling of beeing close to the clients because the logo has positive emotional connotations: it’s associated with the contact with our most close environment in the mobile, our family and our friends. Without any doubt, it could be a very good decision from a neuromarketing strategies perspective. I wouldn't want to raise the debate of whether this use could be considered as legal, since in the Terms of Service Whatsapp expose clearly that it must be used only for non-commercial purposes. But, Can be Whatsapp be considered as a real corporate communication tool?

Little by little, step by step, people using Whatsapp for communications related with their professional activity are becoming more dependent of its service, but nobody ensures them that the service will be available in the terms they could need. Moreover, in their Terms of Service  Whatsapp avoid any kind of responsibility or damaged that can cause by their unavailability. In combination with the lax requirements defined by the regulatory organism (CNMC in Spain), makes the service should be considered unreliable in terms of business continuity.


In order that this could change, the service should be submitted, at least, to the same regulatory requirements that a telco operator. But it seems that is not going to happen in short terms, at least it's not included in the new Spanish telecommunications law  (ley general de telecomunicaciones) that is being processed during this months. So the recommendation that we have to make from a business continuity perspective is that Whatsapp should not be used as a corporate communication tool (and of course neither should be Line, Telegram, Skipe or whatever under the same circumstances). At least is has not to be used as a main communication channel and if used, their would be always an alternative way to establish the communication with the customer.

Last point of the analysis is the lack of agility of Whatsapp when communicating their problems. Although the services outage was at 7:30 pm the incident was recognized and communicated by the company at 21:16 by twitter in its account @wa_status. Could it be because Whatsapp founder and CEO was in Barcelona, in the MWC, this weekend?