WhatsApp takes one-hour break, Twitter explodes in mirth

Social chat platform WhatsApp's hour-long worldwide outage triggered a Twitter outrage like no other on Friday morning. It was like an oxygen supply cut-off, as millions wondered aloud whether they were the only unfortunate victims.

Disbelief morphed into extreme mirth as social media exploded in jokes, mostly at WhatsApp's expense.

The outage was big, even if lasted only an hour. Tracking site downdetector.com recorded large swathes of India fumbling without the chat giant. Soon, the problem triggered a mini-global warming with complaints pouring from West Asia, the Philippines, Germany, the US and Sri Lanka.

Clueless, WhatsApp addicts took to Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to share their woes. But not every tweet was a complaint. This user was much relieved, as he dipped his tweet in a sauce of sarcasm: "Wassapp finally goes down unable to handle flood of Good morning and Good night messages in the family wassapp groups (sic)."

Hyper-ventilating, the addicts asked around. But for Anshu Mor, time was just ripe to unleash another peppy tweet: "Five hundred people in India have already died because WhatsApp is down and they couldn't forward a chain message to 10 people."

#WhatsAppDown was Twitter's top trend, much after the platform came back to life. But in that hour of extreme misery, downdetector.com reported over a thousand complaints. Sixty percent of them had issues connecting, 25% could not receive a message and 14% had struggled to even log in.

For multitudes of WhatsApp addicts, Twitter was their sounding board, a beacon of hope in an hour of crisis.

Tweeted Abhay Ratna Pandey in a sudden burst of nostalgia: "First we used to check neighbourhood from the balcony to see if the light has gone for everyone else too. Now we check twitter to see if #WhatsAppdown (sic)."

Over 200 million Indians are active users of WhatsApp, texting, forwarding images, audios, videos and GIFs every day, every hour. For the huge communities, both young and old, built around WhatsApp groups, the Friday morning outage was a shocker like none other. They heaved a collective sigh of relief as the platform returned after the 'wayward' break.