It's A WhatsApp World

Land of the Giants

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Society & Culture, Business

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Meta’s most expensive acquisition ever and one of the most used communication apps in the world: WhatsApp. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. For better and worse. The story of WhatsApp’s incredible power, as told through its largest market: India. NOTE: There are descriptions of graphic acts of violence in this episode. If you want to skip these descriptions, the section begins at 20:45 and ends at 22:05. Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath) Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear next week's episode by hitting the plus sign in your favorite podcast app Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this show comes from the Genesis GB70 Performance SUV. Every Genesis is a reminder
0:07.6	to try something bold to keep growing, keep hustling. At Genesis, they've harnessed all
0:15.0	that excitement of beginnings into their performance SUV, the GB70. It's a car built to turn
0:22.4	heads with stunning design inside and out. It's packed with intuitive technology inside,
0:28.8	like the 14.5-inch infotainment system, and fingerprint recognition, plus the GB70 features
0:35.2	all-wheel drive, which is bound to add a little more acceleration to your next drive. Your Genesis
0:41.2	GB70 is waiting for you. What will you begin? Learn more at Genesis.com. Genesis, keep beginning.
0:50.4	You probably don't remember where you were on October 4th 2021.
1:02.9	Tonight, major outages affecting billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
1:08.3	All of it starting this morning and continuing through the day. All three apps went offline at
1:13.6	the same time around the world. In convenience, Doom's scrollers on Facebook and Instagram
1:19.1	switched over to other platforms. So much so that the official Twitter account tweeted out,
1:24.0	hello, literally everyone. But for Rejive Kira, WhatsApp going down was a much bigger deal.
1:32.0	We never thought WhatsApp would be down for so long.
1:34.7	The official shutdown lasted for about six hours, but the effects lingered in a few places,
1:40.3	such as India, which meant enormous consequences for people like Kira. WhatsApp is his livelihood.
1:47.2	He founded a food tech business called Chaki Piecing outside New Delhi, India, that delivers
1:52.0	freshly milled flour and spices to people. And he runs it primarily on WhatsApp. That's where he
1:57.5	lists available items, chats with customers, processes orders. So 78% of our business was down.
2:06.0	Kira was not alone. About 15 million businesses run on WhatsApp in India.
2:11.1	And even today to be very honest, we don't have an alternative which can 100% replace WhatsApp
2:16.8	if that is a dumb thing. In India, WhatsApp is more than a private messaging service.
	...

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