I want to point out something from one of the articles which is so far from the truth that it somewhat undercuts the authors credibility:

> For instance, if WhatsApp goes down, not only can you not send/receive messages, you won’t be able to see your old ones, and no one else on your network will be able to either. You could argue that a single email provider has the same effect, but you’d be wrong. If Gmail goes down, I can still send emails to Gmail recipients and I can still see past messages from Gmail users.

Obviously you will be able to see all your WhatsApp messages when WhatsApp goes down. The same is true for Facebook Messenger and many other applications, because everything is saved locally. It's even possible to send WhatsApp messages while being offline which will then be delivered later on.