Articles about WhatsApp

In October, the internet was shaken by the Facebook outage that affected dozens of big-name companies, as well as millions of brands and businesses that advertise on Facebook’s platform. Because of something as simple as a misconfigured Domain Name System (DNS) record, every device with the Facebook app integration started DDoS-ing recursive DNS resolvers -- DDoS meaning "Distributed Denial of Service." This, in turn, caused overloading in countless cases across the board.

You might be thinking to yourself, "So, what? A few sites were offline for a couple of hours." But the outage brought to light other issues. Communications for the very Facebook employees that could fix this issue were crippled. Some of these hindrances went so far that people were unable to enter buildings because the physical badge system wasn't even online.

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History will treat Monday and Tuesday as days the tech world would love to forget. 

Monday was Black Monday for those who rely on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All of these Facebook-owned properties went down for around eight hours, leaving a lot of people confused and services such as Twitter booming with the extra traffic. This was a critical outage that even affected Facebook employees and their internal systems, making it impossible for many people at Facebook to use anything they needed to get their jobs done. 

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There are a huge number of messaging apps to choose from these days, and the chances are that many people you know use different chat tools. You may use Facebook Messenger with your family, WhatsApp with friends, and Slack for work, for example.

While there are various apps that claim to unify the chat experience and let you chat across multiple networks, they always miss out an important player. The same cannot be said of Beeper. This app lets you chat with people across no fewer than 15 messaging platforms, including Apple's iMessage, across MacOS, Windows, Linux‍, iOS and Android.

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The coronavirus pandemic has people around the world searching for information about what they should and shouldn't be doing, as well as news about the spread. But there is a lot of misinformation out there, and social media platforms are breeding grounds for such harmful content to spread.

Facebook has been taking steps to counter misinformation about COVID-19, not only on the main Facebook platform, but also on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Now the company is expanding its efforts to connect people with trustworthy information about coronavirus.

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WhatsApp is a wildly popular chat program globally, but in the USA, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, there are many Americans that use it, but it is far more ubiquitous in other countries such as India, for instance. In the USA, SMS and iMessage seem to reign supreme.

Today, the social network Facebook — which owns WhatsApp — is celebrating a huge milestone. You see, the company is claiming there are now 2 billion people using WhatsApp.

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When app hackers discovered references to Disappearing Messages in beta versions of WhatsApp, it was -- understandably -- assumed that this was going to develop into a self-destructing messages feature. But when the same option was renamed to the less-exciting Delete Messages, the name didn't really tally.

Further details shared by WABetaInfo about the latest beta of the WhatsApp app for iOS shows that the feature is very much not what people were expecting... or hoping. Oh, and if you were hoping for a Dark Mode option, you're going to have to wait a bit longer.

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While WhatsApp is primarily a communication tool, a new integration from Any.do also makes it possible to extend the capabilities of the chat app to create tasks and reminders using natural language.

As WhatsApp is often used in both the business and personal worlds to discuss a set up meetings, appointments and get-togethers, the ability to set reminders at the same time as discussing plans makes perfect sense. Like Any.do and WhatsApp themselves, the new feature is cross-platform, and can be found on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and the web.

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Facebook has launched a new payment service that can be used to send money and buy goods and services from within its apps -- and it's nothing to do with Libra.

The service is called Facebook Pay; it's available in the US for now, but it will expand into more countries in due course. The service allows for payments to be made in Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Given the social network's reputation for privacy, it remains to be seen whether people trust it as much as the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay.

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In today’s digital workplace, taking advantage of digital collaboration and social media tools is a business imperative. With global social media use greater than ever before, and still very much on the rise, it comes as no surprise that it has embedded itself into the workplace. Just like email, social media and instant messaging apps like WeChat and WhatsApp are becoming business essentials.

We’re all familiar with the shadow IT problem and how many IT departments are still unaware of all the applications and channels their employees are downloading and using for business conduct. Today, the social media channels and instant messaging apps needed to communicate with customers and cultivate new business are both easier for an average employee to use and come with much greater risks. This ease of use and popularity also means that several departments within a company like marketing and sales are both vulnerable to and responsible for preventing a variety of threats that they’re simply not equipped to handle.

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Being such globally recognized names, you would think that a rebranding of WhatsApp and Instagram would be a crazy exercise... but that's precisely what Facebook is doing.

In a move that is more than a little surprising -- and, many would argue, somewhat pointless -- the social networking giant is to rename the two products Instagram from Facebook and WhatsApp from Facebook. The renaming will make it clear that the company people love to hate is behind the chat and social networking tools.

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These days, if you want to chat with friends and family you probably do so through one of the many mobile messaging choices -- such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Snapchat.

Before mobile communications really took off, Microsoft’s cross-platform MSN Messenger (later rebranded Windows Live Messenger) was the chat tool. At its peak, some 330 million users a month were logging into the instant messaging client. MSN Messenger was discontinued in 2014, with Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype from eBay largely to blame for its demise, but if you’ve ever wondered what the chat tool might look like if it was revived today, then MSN Messenger 2019 Edition is the answer.

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By now you’ve heard the news: WhatsApp is currently rolling out an urgent update to all app users to close a major vulnerability that leaves unpatched phones at risk of being targeted by hackers. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and if you plan to stick with the platform, don’t wait for an update notification: access your phone’s app store now to force install the update.

Except maybe now is the time to go one step further: perhaps it’s the perfect opportunity to switch to a different messaging platform. One that’s not owned by one of the major tech companies, is equally -- if not more -- secure, and which works on more than just your phone. Enter stage left, Telegram, and stage right, Signal.

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Users of WhatsApp could be infected by dangerous spyware just by receiving a call. The spyware, which is thought to  originate from Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group, can be installed just by calling a target -- there is no need for the call to be answered.

A security advisory on the Facebook website does not go into much detail about the exploit, which takes advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability. WhatsApp says it was discovered earlier this month, and with 1.5 billion users, there are a huge number of people that are potentially affected.

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If you've had trouble accessing Facebook today, you're not alone. Users in the US, Europe and Asia struggled to access not only Facebook, but also the WhatsApp and Instagram services owned by the social media giant.

Facebook has said little about this incident which comes just a month after it suffered its worst outage ever, causing problems for users for over 24 hours. This weekend's outage led to #FacebookDown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown hashtags trending on Twitter, and numerous reports of problems were posted to Downdetector.

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Facebook is hardly renowned for respecting privacy, but with WhatsApp the company is taking a small step to give users greater control.

A change to privacy settings for groups means that it is now possible -- at last -- to avoid being added to a group chat you don't to be involved in. WhatsApp has announced that "we're introducing a new privacy setting and invite system to help you decide who can add you to groups".

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