Facebook's $19 bn headache: WhatsApp embarrassing outage traced to network router fault

Just days after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, the popular messaging app, for a shocking sticker price of $19 billion, the service has experienced a major outage, and arguably everyone on the Internet are placing the blame right on Facebook. No doubt, WhatsApp has suffered outages before in the past on several occasions, but the latest outage will likely be talked about for days, since Facebook is now its owner.

The outage happened on Saturday; however, there was a small downtime on Friday too, which might have been the sign of what was to come the following day.

During the outage, several WhatsApp users took to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social mediums to vent their frustration. Some users chose to talk about conspiracy issues, while others believe WhatsApp was shut down intentionally to force users to venture into Facebook chat. It was everything you expected the Internet to be like when something like this happens.

While the outage was causing a ruckus for everyone, a WhatsApp representative confirmed the issue on Twitter.

"sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly," WhatsApp tweeted.

The WhatsApp representative even went as far to point out that the app has gone down several times in the past, at least one time per month. However, this was not enough to calm the fear of users, as they feel an obvious threat from Facebook. "If you ask the Internet 'Why is WhatsApp down?', everyone - EVERYONE - will give you the same answer," according to the Twitter handle @Whatleydude. Before the end of the day, WhatsApp took to Twitter to announce that everything was back to normal, allowing users to return to their regular WhatsApp duties. "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime..." Whats App tweeted.

According to WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, the culprit was a network router. "We are sorry about the downtime," Koum issued a statement Sunday. "It has been our longest and biggest outage in years. It was caused by a network router fault which cascaded into our servers."

WhatsApp is the leading messaging app on mobile with over 450 million users. The service managed to reach the 400 million user milestone in just over 4 years. In comparison, Facebook only had 145 million users in 4 years, Gmail had 123 million, Skype had 52 million, and Twitter had 54 million.

Looking at the numbers, it easy to see why both Facebook and Google went all out to grab WhatsApp. After all, Mark Zuckerberg may be right: WhatsApp could hit the 1 billion mark in a few years.