WhatsApp Down | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp Down

web.whatsapp.com

105 pointsAvlin6767 comments

If you're here, reading this, and using WhatsApp for any Operations channel of any kind: what are you doing?

I've seen major airport operations in India run off of WhatsApp groupchats and forwards between chats. People will gravitate to what they know lol.

Oh, that's is terrifying. How is there any oversight into an operation running on WhatsApp?

In India, anybody can get a business account, which allows you to setup a catalogue of things, services, and you can pay inside app through underlying UPI interface (government operated quick guaranteed no-return money transfer). I have booked cars for rental, I have bought grocery, pizza, shoes n stuff.

That's crazy. I'd never use something like that to order anything but each their own I suppose...

You're not going to like WeChat then either

You don't have a choice - in India it's as ubiquitous as paypal is here.

There isn't. That is why the UK government likes it for their use, but wants to ban or backdoor parts of it (E2EE) for everyone else.

Ah don’t worry they’re claiming they only used it for coffee orders and such ;)

Also to what actually works, unlike the Enterprise turd sandwiches they are supposed to use.

One of the companies I interned was using Whatsapp but then migrated to Teams/Slack.

Employees did not like it and after a few months everyone migrated to Whatsapp.

I've seen Thai police stations use WhatsApp groups for distributing photos of paperwork and other information.

Oh, and the core of the UK government runs on WhatsApp https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/02/senior-torie...

> the core of the UK government runs on WhatsApp

Wow, I'm surprised a government IT would allow this. Any corp I've worked for strictly prohibited use of messaging tech that's not self-hosted.

That makes me wonder, what _do_ governments around the world use for p2p communication?

phone calls, zoom, hosted email servers, private islands, etc usual stuff.

> Any corp I've worked for strictly prohibited use of messaging tech that's not self-hosted.

I'm sure the business profited greatly from that...

Have worked with gov in a few countries and seen lots of Teams usage.

To my horror, the Irish government also uses WhatsApp quite extensively.

There's a fairly wide history of self hosted Government Microsoft Exchange servers ending in ransomware payouts that suggests that blunt self hosting rules isn't as useful as it sounds.

And right now you look can look all the big MoveIT mass exfiltration hitting a wide range of orgs that wouldn't use Sharepoint "for security reasons".

Ask the UK government…

Shadow IT systems

WhatsApp was used by the Afghan Army to coordinate military communications and maneuvers. I wouldn't be surprised if other under-resourced military forces (i.e. Ukrainian) use it as a form of communications.

See this movie's footage for Afghan Army usage: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/retrograde_2022_2

Then again, the Afgan Army was never a model of competence

You mean the one that defeated two superpowers?

Afhanistan and the Ukraine both have a little less than 40M inhabitants. (Which is around half of germany, or like 20M less than France).

The Ukraine has/had a relevant IT-offshoring sector, from Wikipedia there's around 1/3 of the soviet military industry that was sitting there (including companies like Antonow)... and they had a few years of preparation since the krim was occupied where they knew that russian secret services would try to undermine any kind of communication infrastructure.

I doubt that they currently rely on WhatsApp for military communication...

It’s just “Ukraine” now btw. No “the”.

Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. What do you mean by "It's just Ukraine now". Was it always just Ukraine or hast that changed recently?

Edit: But thanks for the information :)

When people say "the Ukraine" it is taken to refer to Ukraine as a region rather than a country. I'm not 100% on why but the wording matters a lot.

yet people use slack for similar and get applauded?

I think you would be surprised at what portion of global commodities trade, and perhaps trade in general, transacts via WhatsApp.

And they can lie in the bed that they've made.

Everyone has to make their bed somewhere…

Exactly!

DNS of whatsapp.com is down. The app works fine

dig +trace reveals that only some of the nameservers don't respond (on IPv4, but got a fine response after trying an IPv6).

    ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out
    ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out
    ;; communications error to 66.111.50.12#53: timed out
    ;; communications error to 66.111.48.12#53: timed out
    whatsapp.com.  60 IN A 157.240.223.60
    ;; Received 57 bytes from 2620:13e:100d:c::35#53(d.ns.whatsapp.net) in 119 ms

Especially a.ns.whatsapp.net still seems down (IPv6 also).

I wonder whether this could be a BGP thing again, it was modified very recently according to [1] but I don't understand too much about that.

[1] https://lg.twelve99.net/?type=bgp&router=bei-b2&address=66.1...

I didn't get the sense of a BGP error, mtr to ipv4 [a-d].ns.whatsapp.net looked ok enough during the outage. I even got back responses from d.ns.whatsapp.net to mtr probes while not getting DNS responses. Although, now that DNS is working, the mtrs are pretty different, I'm not used to getting such wide geographical response.

It's always DNS.

So is the conclusions: use IPs? Or how can you protect your app against those outages?

Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. We built in resilience against DNS failing because there's a lot of networks in the world, and some of them don't have consistently working DNS. Turns out it also helps a lot when someone hijacks your domain account (grr), or DDoSes your DNS provider (on my birthday too, grr), or you mess up DNS somehow (nobody was willing to tell me what happened yesterday, grr). Doesn't help much with BGP based outages though.

The trick is if you bake IPs into your client packages, you need to have most or at least some of those IPs still working until the packages expire, and you need to have a process for server teams and client teams to update the lists for future releases as well as for server teams to know what's in the client builds in the wild. That's not too hard if you're running in bare metal hosting and your hosts are long lived. It's harder if you're running ephemeral cloud stuff (but there's ways to reserve IPs, so it's not _that_ hard).

There's some additional difficulty if you're only running ipv4 servers and some of your clients only have NAT64 access to ipv4. But, it's 2023, you can and probably should make ipv6 work on your servers.

Whatsapp's DNS records are back up now: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records...

Well, you know what they say: What's goes App must go Down!

The WhatsApp messenger seems to be working, however.

They’re wrong, I am using it now.

Yes WhatsApp.com is wrong about the status of their own messenger hehe

At least the web gateway is down. Not sure about phones that were already connected. Perhaps a DNS issue - error is DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN ?

If it's just DNS, as it seems to be from my perspective, that's likely to break the gateway for browsers, but it doesn't mean the gateway is down; just hard to access.

The phone client is resilient to DNS failures, but it's hard to do that for a website used by a browser (I'm not really sure how it would be done, probably something with service workers which can intercept and process outgoing requests?); and impossible to do if you hadn't loaded it previously.

Disclaimer: I worked at WhatsApp until 2019, including on resilience to DNS failures.

I'm using the downloadable app though, you can do IP pinning in there too, but seems nobody bothered to do it.

Now I wish I had somewhere a history of DNS entries.

Edit: there appears to be historical DNS records on the internet, so pinning a known IP in /etc/hosts make things work

Yeah, it's possible to have IP fallbacks in the downloadable app, but if it's not working, it's likely it wasn't done (although I'm not in a place to check if the web gateway is currently working; it's possible two things are broken at the same time)

Looks like it's back now (or in progress to back anyway), but if you want to mess around with your hosts file, and you don't mind a bit of spelunking, you can find your suggested facebook IP with host www.facebook.com, and then look around in the /24 of that IP, looking for whatsapp-cdn-... in reverse DNS. That IP should respond well to requests for web.whatsapp.com. You might need to do something for the websocket hostname(s) too, but I forget the details of that. Might work going to the same IP. Take a look at domains used now, in case you want to do this again in the future.

whatsapp.com, wa.me, etc are not responding

It happened just as I was connecting my new phone to Whatsapp. Made for a few worrying moments where I was wondering if I had made a mistake somewhere and got myself locked out of my account...

Lasted 2 hours in some places https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp

Never let a good crisis go to waste. I got a family member to install Signal!

Both web.whatsapp.com and the messenger are working for me.

maybe dns ?

It's always DNS

https://isitdns.com/

Sorry, what's app down ?

works fine here

Looks like they took Erlang's "let it fail" philosophy literally.

Did META just kill off WhatsApp during the Apple presentation when Apple is presenting their own VR solution?

Or am I reading too much into this?

What would killing WhatsApp achieve in relation to that?

I guess you're right. Not much.

This isn’t remotely relevant

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