[HN Gopher] WhatsApp Down
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WhatsApp Down
Author : Avlin67
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-06-05 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.whatsapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.whatsapp.com)
| DANmode wrote:
| If you're here, reading this, and using WhatsApp for any
| Operations channel of any kind: what are you doing?
| didntknowya wrote:
| yet people use slack for similar and get applauded?
| snake_doc wrote:
| 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
| flusensieb wrote:
| 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...
| switch007 wrote:
| It's just "Ukraine" now btw. No "the".
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Then again, the Afgan Army was never a model of competence
| qeternity wrote:
| I think you would be surprised at what portion of global
| commodities trade, and perhaps trade in general, transacts via
| WhatsApp.
| mike_hock wrote:
| And they can lie in the bed that they've made.
| crobertsbmw wrote:
| Everyone has to make their bed somewhere...
| Havoc wrote:
| Shadow IT systems
| dspillett wrote:
| Ask the UK government...
| jasoncartwright wrote:
| 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...
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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?
| discordance wrote:
| Have worked with gov in a few countries and seen lots of
| Teams usage.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > 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...
| Aleklart wrote:
| phone calls, zoom, hosted email servers, private islands,
| etc usual stuff.
| nsriv wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Oh, that's is terrifying. How is there any oversight into an
| operation running on WhatsApp?
| davchana wrote:
| 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.
| elforce002 wrote:
| That's crazy. I'd never use something like that to order
| anything but each their own I suppose...
| mousetree wrote:
| You're not going to like WeChat then either
| sharadov wrote:
| You don't have a choice - in India it's as ubiquitous as
| paypal is here.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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.
| smcl wrote:
| Ah don't worry they're claiming they only used it for
| coffee orders and such ;)
| davidkuennen wrote:
| 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?
| whatyesaid wrote:
| What would killing WhatsApp achieve in relation to that?
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I guess you're right. Not much.
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| This isn't remotely relevant
| baud147258 wrote:
| 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...
| fortuna86 wrote:
| [dead]
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Well, you know what they say: What's goes App must go Down!
| lom wrote:
| works fine here
| 8ivek wrote:
| [dead]
| pul wrote:
| Whatsapp's DNS records are back up now:
| https://www.nslookup.io/domains/web.whatsapp.com/dns-records...
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| They're wrong, I am using it now.
|
| Yes WhatsApp.com is wrong about the status of their own messenger
| hehe
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| whatsapp.com, wa.me, etc are not responding
| ddalex wrote:
| 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 ?
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| ddalex wrote:
| 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
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Both web.whatsapp.com and the messenger are working for me.
| bwb wrote:
| Lasted 2 hours in some places
| https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whatsapp
| revskill wrote:
| Sorry, what's app down ?
| conformist wrote:
| The WhatsApp messenger seems to be working, however.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Oh no, how will Europeans communicate with each other?
| spookie wrote:
| Telegram? In my experience, European countries seem to use it
| alot
| qorrect wrote:
| And Latam
| Avlin67 wrote:
| maybe dns ?
| Halfwhit wrote:
| It's always DNS
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| https://isitdns.com/
| lopatin wrote:
| Looks like they took Erlang's "let it fail" philosophy literally.
| madacol wrote:
| DNS of whatsapp.com is down. The app works fine
| paulddraper wrote:
| It's always DNS.
| kro wrote:
| 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...
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-06-05 23:01 UTC)