WhatsApp Struggles to Stay Online Due to Usage Spike Caused by Social Distancing

Social distancing and people staying home to avoid the COVID-19 means the Internet is recording a huge spike in usage, and just as expected, Facebook and WhatsApp are two of the services most often used by everyone to stay in touch with relatives and coworkers.

But at the same time, such a spike in usage means Facebook and WhatsApp can very well go down without the necessary infrastructure upgrades.

And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says they are now working on preventing an outage by doubling server capacity for WhatsApp. And yet, despite these preventive measures, there’s still a chance the instant messaging service would end up struggling to stay online once the pandemic expands.

“This isn’t a massive outbreak in the majority of countries around the world yet,” Zuckerberg said. “But if it gets there, then we really need to make sure we’re on top of this from an infrastructure perspective to make sure that things don’t melt down.”

Others struggling as well

The Facebook owner compared the usage recorded these days on WhatsApp with the one that typically occurs around New Year’s Eve when everyone uses the app to send photos or make calls.

“We are on a sustained basis well beyond what that spike is on New Year’s. Just making sure that we can manage that is the challenge that we’re trying to make sure that we can stay in front of,” he was quoted as saying.

Facebook and WhatsApp aren’t the only ones experiencing trouble due to the number of people working from home these days. Microsoft itself announced a series of changes to Office 365 in an attempt to prevent slowdowns, throttling a series of non-essential features in an attempt to allocate more resources for tasks under heavy stress these days.