In a few hours just after Facebook announced the $16 billion acquisition of Whatsapp, the messenger service went down. The outage send 4.5million new users to rival messenger service, Telegram.
The cause of the outage? A router fault that affected the servers.
Wrote CNET,
A glitch that took down the WhatsApp messaging service Saturday was caused by a network router issue, the company said on Sunday.The service was unavailable to a large number of users as of around 11 a.m. PT Saturday, a problem confirmed by WhatsApp’s “WhatsApp Status” Twitter feed. WhatsApp was back in service by 2:47 p.m. PT on Saturday, according to an updated tweet.
The news of Facebook acquisition already created alarm bells to users and the outage only added fuel to the fire that saw many WhatsApp users switch to an alternative messenger service.
Wrote The Guardian,
One, Telegram Messenger, is already feeling the impact. “4.95 million people signed up for Telegram today. Telegram is #1 most downloaded iPhone app in 48 countries,” the company revealed late last night (23 February) through its official Twitter account.That’s a startling number for an app that as recently as October 2013had around 100,000 daily active users. A case of WhatsApp users fleeing from Facebook? Perhaps, but it seems no coincidence that Telegram’s 5m signups happened the day after a high-profile outage for WhatsApp, when its service was unavailable for four hours.
As can be seen, one router outage resulted in 5 million WhatsApp users to take flight to an alternative messenger service. Can you imagine if your web service faced an outage and the damage it could do to your brand?
At NetGain Systems, we recommend that businesses that are highly dependent on the network to do business should take pro-active and preventive action to address issues before they become major outages.
One of the issues with outages is that the IT team usually take more time to identify a problem than to solve it. It doesn’t help when higher management is at their backs demanding for updates.
Here is how NetGain Systems help IT teams to take that pro-active and preventive action.
The above is a screenshot of the NetGain System’s dashboard. It is colour coded to show the alert levels with red being critical and green being normal. This alert levels are predetermine by users.
With reference to the example of WhatsApp’s router outage, let’s say the IT team has been alerted via email that one of the routers have reached critical levels. After receiving the alert, the IT team can easily access the dashboard via a browser and investigate the problem.
Knowing that it is a router alert, the IT team can easily click on the device monitored which will list out all the devices monitored in the network. It will bring the IT team to the next screen.
In this screen, the IT team can immediately see the devices that have triggered the critical alerts. Clicking on Cisco Router14, they will get more details about router issue.
This immediate identification allows the IT team to action. Taking preventive and pro-active action enables IT team to focus on the business of IT instead of spending time dealing with the consequences of IT outages.
