Facebook said late Monday that the company believes a “faulty configuration” change caused a widespread outage that lasted roughly six hours. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, …
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Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are starting to come back online after a widespread outage lasted more than six hours on Monday, disrupting communications for the company’s roughly 3 billion users. “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to …
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WhatsApp didn’t fully explain to Europeans how it uses their data as called for by EU privacy law, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said on Thursday. The regulator hit the messaging app with a fine of 225 million euros, about $267 million. Partly at issue is how WhatsApp share information with parent company Facebook, according to the commission. The decision brings an end …
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Facebook has been moving forward with plans to integrate messaging on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, but those efforts are still far from over. Facebook Messenger users can already reach people through Instagram direct message and vice versa without downloading a new app. The company also wants to make cross-app communication between Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging app, possible. …
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Facebook is bringing voice and video calling back to its main mobile app, the company said. The features have been absent from the main mobile app since 2014 when Facebook moved them into its separate Messenger app. The features began appearing for some people on Monday as part of a test, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The move follows on the heels …
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WhatsApp users will soon be able to move their chat history between iOS and Android devices if they decide to switch mobile operating systems. The announcement came during Wednesday’s Samsung Unpacked event. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Facebook, also posted about the feature in a tweet: “Want to securely take your WhatsApp history from one platform to another? We’re …
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WhatsApp wants in on ephemeral content. The Facebook-owned company on Tuesday unveiled View Once photos and videos, which vanish from a chat after they’ve been opened, “giving users even more control over their privacy.” Like personal messages, View Once media is protected by end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp says. Photos and videos sent using this feature will have a “one-time” icon to …
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WhatsApp is adding a new feature with the aim of making it easier for people to join group calls with family and friends. Joinable calls allow you to hop on a call that’s already started, or leave and rejoin the call as long as it’s still going. The chat app is also adding an information screen to your calls so you …
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WhatsApp is rolling out a limited public beta test for its updated multidevice capability. The Facebook subsidiary plans “to initially test the experience with a small group of users from our existing beta program,” according to a Wednesday post on Facebook’s engineering website. With the beta, first teased in June, users will be able to use WhatsApp on a phone …
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TikTok has become the first non-Facebook mobile app to surpass 3 billion downloads globally, according to a Tuesday analysis from Sensor Tower. The milestone makes TikTok the fifth nongame app to cross the threshold, following WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram, which are all owned by Facebook. In the first half of 2021, TikTok became the most downloaded nongame app globally, boasting …
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