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You probably don't remember where you were on October 4th, 2021. Tonight, major outages affecting billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All of it starting this morning and continuing through the day. All three apps went offline at the same time around the world. Inconvenience doom scrollers on Facebook and Instagram switched over to other platforms. So much so that the official Twitter account tweeted out, "'Hello, literally everyone.'"
But for Rajiv Kira, WhatsApp going down was a much bigger deal. We never thought WhatsApp would be down for so long. The official shutdown lasted for about six hours, but the effects lingered in a few places, such as India, which meant enormous consequences for people like Kira.
WhatsApp is his livelihood. He founded a food tech business called Chaki Piecing outside New Delhi, India, that delivers freshly milled flour and spices to people. And he runs it primarily on WhatsApp. That's where he lists available items, chats with customers, processes orders. So 70-80% of our business was down.
Kira was not alone. About 15 million businesses run on WhatsApp in India. And even today, to be very honest, we don't have an alternative which can 100% replace WhatsApp if there is a downtime. In India, WhatsApp is more than a private messaging service. For its 400 million users there, WhatsApp is the internet.
Or you could put it like this: Though it doesn't contribute much to Meta's bottom line yet, WhatsApp is the company's most essential product by far.
That's because with over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. But there's a dark side to connecting the world.
Enormous platforms can cause enormous problems. India is WhatsApp's biggest market, and viral hoaxes on the platform are being blamed for a recent spate of mob violence. Recently in India, internet lynch mobs have killed a dozen people, including innocent bystanders. The encrypted messaging platform has become a playground for conspiracy theorists. Today, the story of WhatsApp's incredible power is told through its largest market, India.
Mark Zuckerberg has had a long history with India, even before WhatsApp solidified his company's dominance there. Now, WhatsApp is particularly intertwined in Indian society, for better and for worse. This is Land of the Giants. Long before WhatsApp was one of the biggest apps in the world, Neeraj Arora noticed it starting to climb the downloads chart of Google's Android Play Store.
The year was 2010, and Aurora was working on corporate development at Google. He was tasked with looking for startups to acquire at the dawn of the smartphone era. WhatsApp had no information about them on the website, so I emailed support at WhatsApp.com. I didn't hear back for several days. Finally, I think Brian replied on support.
Brian is in Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp with Yankum. The founders met while working at Yahoo. Now they were building WhatsApp out of a small back office in Silicon Valley. Aurora remembers it had an informal meeting room. So it was sort of like just a cubicle, not really a conference room.
And I was like, "Shit, this is very weird because I'm going to talk some sensitive stuff with you." And they're like, "I don't care." Neither did Aurora. He left the meeting excited about the potential for what Acton and Coom were building. He made an offer for the startup on behalf of Google: $10 million. An impressive price tag, considering that WhatsApp boasted barely a million downloads so far and hadn't raised any outside capital.
And yet, Acton and Coom passed. So Aurora came back within a few months with a better deal, one that he says Google co-founder Larry Page had to personally sign off on: $100 million. They said, "Look, we left Yahoo to start WhatsApp for a reason. We hate big companies and we cannot operate the way we can here. So thank you very much. Thanks for spending time with us." A power move that left a lasting impression.
When Aurora left Google looking for his next career move, he called WhatsApp. Obviously, the only company I really wanted to work at was WhatsApp. I'd seen everything, Dropbox, Airbnb, Square, all the hot darlings of the valley.
were not that interesting. This was sort of like the hidden gem that nobody knew about and was just growing really well and the founders were incredible. Aurora joined WhatsApp in November 2011 as its chief business officer. And by then, WhatsApp's growth was taking off, purely by word of mouth. Tens of millions of people were using the app. The most important thing was that our daily to monthly active users ratio
was the best in the industry. I think it was around 70 something percent. Like 70% of your monthly active users would come back daily, which was, I think, better than Facebook's.
Here's why WhatsApp was taking off. It was a cheaper alternative to texting. Traditional text messaging was expensive in a lot of the world at the time. You often got charged per text. Messaging apps like WhatsApp instead used internet data plans. And WhatsApp was simple, both to sign up for and to use. Kuminaktin made a priority of supporting every kind of smartphone possible, so WhatsApp could work no matter the device. And your account was just your phone number.
The app limited the information it collected on you. Not your location and not the names or addresses of your contacts. This spoke to a key value for the founders of WhatsApp: privacy. From the very beginning, privacy and security were built into the company's DNA. This was more than a design feature. It was what the founders felt they owed their users. Koum was born in Ukraine during the Soviet years. Growing up, his parents avoided using the telephone for fear they were being monitored by the state.
If Coombs' appreciation for privacy came from his personal history, Acton's came from his professional past. At Yahoo in the 90s, he'd run an advertising platform that collected click-through data. It turned him off for good on targeted ads. He had a very kind of like an ugly experience trying to figure that thing out. I think he didn't really enjoy that experience of collecting all the data and showing ads and all that. So when they started WhatsApp and when Brian joined, it was very clear. He said, I'm never going to do that.
This is a very intimate and personal product that we are building. I would hate to collect or know what people are chatting about on my app, right? So from day one, it was not an option. Koum famously taped a note to his work desk from Acton that read, "No ads, no games, no gimmicks."
WhatsApp's emphasis on simplicity and privacy was working. By early 2013, the company had 200 million active users. And with advertising off the table, Acton and Coombe decided to charge a whopping 99 cents a year for the app.
It wasn't much, but in the world of free social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, it was unusual. And according to Aurora, it was actually part of an effort to slow down growth to a manageable pace. But the strategy didn't work out exactly as planned. The growth never stopped. People were still paying. And they were shocked. And I remember I still have the screenshot somewhere where I think there was a point where
We were the top paid app on the App Store in 50 different countries at the same time. WhatsApp's success was starting to make waves. In April 2013, Coom took the stage at the All Things Dean mobile conference and revealed that WhatsApp had more users than Twitter. Everybody was taken aback, like, who are these guys? They've never talked about themselves, and now they're saying they're bigger than Twitter, right? Aurora says after Coom's mic drop, major acquisition offers rolled in.
The Chinese company Tencent was the first big one. Ten billion dollars. Google called again. This time, Larry Page wanted to meet. And the meeting got scheduled, but... It would be too late. Because someone else had been keeping track of WhatsApp's success. Mark Zuckerberg.
We were getting into the zone of half a billion users, active users, really active every day, and with an opportunity to definitely get to a billion users and do a lot of other things than just messaging. So it was absolutely an existential threat for Facebook, and he knew that. As he had shown with the purchase of Instagram, Zuckerberg was always on the lookout for challengers to his social media empire.
And WhatsApp's growth on mobile phones directly challenged Facebook Messenger, especially because WhatsApp was taking off in parts of the world that Messenger just wasn't. And at a more fundamental level, people were using WhatsApp for many of the same reasons they might otherwise use Facebook: to keep in touch with family and friends online. It was a network of users that might never enter the Facebook universe. Zuckerberg needed it, or he might lose to it.
So he made his move. Before WhatsApp was set to meet with Google, Zuckerberg invited Coom over for dinner. Facebook said, look, whatever it takes, the kind of deal you want to structure, whatever you want, we'll give it to you. And by whatever you want, they meant it. Autonomy, no ads, complete product independence for Jan and Brian, board seat for Jan, which we didn't ask for, they offered. We said, okay, fine. And...
End-to-end encryption was a deal point that spoke to Acton and Coombs' focus on privacy.
The technology would prevent anyone except the sender and the recipient of a message from being able to read it. So even WhatsApp itself wouldn't be able to know the contents of the conversations flowing through its service. The encryption deal point also spoke to an inherent tension between WhatsApp and Facebook early on.
Facebook's business model depended on collecting data about users' likes and interactions so it could use that data to personalize ads. Obviously, Jan and Brian might never put this on the record that we were doing this partially so that Facebook never gets any information about our users. But I know for sure that was one of the reasons they wanted to do it.
Even if WhatsApp's adherence to privacy was contradictory in some ways to Facebook's business, Facebook just wanted to get the deal done. Coombe and Zuckerberg did just that on Valentine's Day in 2014. The agreed price? $19 billion in mostly Facebook stock. It would be Zuckerberg's largest acquisition ever, by far.
It was a whirlwind romance.
WhatsApp is a great company and it's a great fit for us. Just shy of two weeks after the deal was signed, Zuckerberg was in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress, a gigantic trade show for the mobile telecommunications industry. Already almost half a billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging. And it's
It's the most engaging app that we've ever seen exist on mobile by far. People were stunned by how much he paid for WhatsApp. It was the most expensive purchase of any private tech startup to date.
So when Zuckerberg was asked to explain his rationale, he sounded a little defensive. I actually just think that by itself it's worth more than $19 billion. I mean, it's hard to exactly make that case today because they have so little revenue compared to that number. But I mean, the reality is there are very few services that reach a billion people in the world. They're all incredibly valuable, much more valuable than that.
For Zuckerberg, WhatsApp was invaluable because it was a way to fulfill his original mission of getting as many people in the world as possible using one of Facebook's products. When Jan and I first met and started talking about this, we really started talking about what it was going to be like to connect everyone in the world. And a lot of this is the vision for Internet.org, and that's what I really want to take the time to focus on today.
So around 2015,
Pranav Digjit is a technology reporter for BuzzFeed, who was based in India from 2014 to 2022.
That telecom war he mentions, it meant that suddenly India experienced a huge drop in internet data costs. A whole bunch of people who couldn't afford to get online before now could. Most people in India experience the internet almost entirely on their smartphones. India leapfrogged, as they say, the desktop PC era. Most people never had them.
So, back to Zuckerberg's Internet.org project, a way to get onto all those smartphones. Practically, it meant Facebook partnered with major telecom services in India and other countries to provide a free, stripped-down version of the Internet. Facebook, of course, would be one of a few sites available. Facebook branded Internet.org as an idealistic project to deliver the human right of connection. But many did not buy that branding.
Especially in India, where there were protests against Facebook's initiative. Many people, and even the government, saw it as an attempt by Facebook to control the internet. The government ended up outright banning the project. But lucky for Zuckerberg, he would still have a way to those hundreds of millions of users. WhatsApp in India is a way of life. In the years following Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp, the app flourished in India.
Even with limited 2G mobile internet connections, people could load WhatsApp relatively quickly because it was simple, with far fewer features than social media apps like Facebook. WhatsApp was a success, except in one respect. Revenue.
Just a few years after the acquisition, conversations inside Facebook began to turn to how WhatsApp could make money. That subscription WhatsApp originally charged? Facebook removed it after the deal. They wanted to run ads on the Stories feature that WhatsApp built. Called Status, this feature was a knockoff of Instagram Stories. It launched in 2017. To Facebook, Status was a natural place to run ads.
They had all the infrastructure of running ads on Instagram and Facebook. So they were like, we just plug it in. I think Brian had an allergic reaction to that. He was like, I'm leaving. And he left a lot of money on the table. Acton walked away from roughly $850 million in Facebook shares. He would go on to become the chairman of Signal, another encrypted messaging app that's run as a nonprofit. And when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, Acton tweeted out, quote, it is time, hashtag delete Facebook.
A few months after Acton left, Coom quit too, though it's unclear how much ads had to do with it. In his farewell post, he said he wanted to spend more time on his hobbies, like collecting rare air-cooled Porsches and playing Ultimate Frisbee. This whole situation is ironic because ads never came to WhatsApp. Facebook decided that the risk of backlash wouldn't be worth it, but not before Acton, Coom, and Aurora were out the door.
And then Facebook decided to lean into the values of WhatsApp to embrace its focus on privacy as a selling point. I think you have to think about what it means to offer a service where people communicate their most private thoughts to the people they care about the most all around the world. The current head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart.
Cathcart transferred over from the Facebook app in 2019. Now, he says, Meta has embraced an ads-free WhatsApp. Instead, it's pushing to make money by charging businesses to message their customers. There are a lot of really, really sensitive conversations that happen on WhatsApp.
Everything from people talking to a doctor, people talking to a journalist. In a lot of countries where WhatsApp's popular, government officials talking amongst themselves. So you've got to offer the highest level of security. This preaching of WhatsApp's original values, it's not just coming from Cathcart. Privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves. It's easier to feel like you belong when you're part of smaller communities and amongst your closest friends. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 conference in 2019.
With Russian misinformation and Cambridge Analytica behind him, this was the year Zuckerberg made a hard pivot to privacy. Specifically, he said he believed the future of communication would increasingly shift to encrypted messaging. As the world gets bigger and more connected, we need that sense of intimacy more than ever. So that's why I believe that the future is private. Privacy and encryption. They'd become virtues to Facebook.
But these commitments are now putting Meta and WhatsApp at odds with the government of India, its largest market. Because connecting so many people, even through private group chats, can cause real-world problems.
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Go to Blinds.com for 40% off site wide. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Please note, in the second half of the episode, there are descriptions of graphic acts of violence. If you want to skip this content, exact times are given in the show notes. India lives and dies by what we call forwards, which is just people forwarding pieces of content.
pictures, videos, text to each other on WhatsApp. Pranav Dixit, technology reporter for BuzzFeed News. He's describing a popular WhatsApp feature, forwarded messages, content you could easily send off to your friends or whatever groups you were a part of. You will be in like 50 different WhatsApp groups.
full of people you may know, like your friends and family. And maybe you're also in a few groups with people you don't know that well, like ones for your neighborhood or school. And those can get pretty big, filled with hundreds of people. Most forwarded content tends to be mundane. Good mornings, weather reports, recipes. But as with anything that can go potentially viral, some forwards aren't so benign.
In late 2017, a wave of so-called stranger danger videos spread across WhatsApp in India. These stranger danger videos that went out said the following things. Look out for your children. There are strangers in your area. They're coming to kidnap your children and take their kidneys. That was the basic message in multiple different vernacular languages across India.
Shakuntala Banaji is a professor of media, culture, and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She researches the spread of misinformation. What struck Banaji was that these videos were carefully edited and tailored to different ethnic groups, often depicting local children being seemingly kidnapped or hurt by malicious outsiders.
So for example, you'd have a video of a killing of children from Halabja. Overlapping that, you would have a voiceover in Tamil or Telugu or Hindi saying something like, this is what people traffickers are doing in your area, even though it was so clear from the visuals that the children were not locals. But nevertheless, this spread absolute panic.
So there was a call to arms at the end of each of these messages, asking people to forward them, and essentially almost cajoling them to take things into their own hands and do something about these people who were kidnapping their children. Pranav Dixit reported on what happened when one of these Stranger Danger videos went viral. I ended up traveling to this tiny hamlet called Raimpada.
which is in the Indian state of Maharashtra in the western part of the country, where just days before I visited, five people had been lynched to death in an extremely gruesome and brutal manner. Basically a mob of 40 people
stone them and beat them to death inside the village council office. The video that spurred that violence, it was complete misinformation. It featured an image of dead children that was actually from the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack in Syria. But the fact that the information was being shared by people in WhatsApp groups made it feel more trustworthy. WhatsApp is your window to the world and you believe everything that you see there because
You know, oh, somebody I know sent me this. A friend sent me this. Somebody from my village sent me this. So it must be true. Banaji says in addition to the trust factor, there was something else at work here. An atmosphere of heightened religious and political tensions.
As we were doing our research, it became evident that very quickly the discourse morphed from it's just any stranger in your area to it's Muslim invaders, it's Muslim infiltrators, it's people from across the border, it's Bangladeshis, it's Rohingya. So really quickly, so it began to look like there had been a kind of plan all along to sow distrust and enmity against new people coming into particular areas.
Regional ethnic and religious conflicts in India predate the internet.
But just as access to the internet started to grow, the political climate changed. So in 2014, Narendra Modi and his government came to power in India after a very sort of concerted new media campaign in which they linked modern technologies to their outreach to different voter groups. Modi ran on a successful, digitally savvy campaign of political populism, vowing to put an end to corruption in India's elite ruling class.
His political party, the BJP, historically has had a Hindu nationalist message, one which was amplified during the campaign and after Modi came to power. This ideology basically states that India is and always has been and always will be a Hindu, mainly Hindu nation, that Hindus should be proud of their Hinduism and should be strong.
Modi's critics say that some of the viral stranger danger rumors on WhatsApp, while not directly started by Modi or the BJP, draw on religious divisions at the core of the party's politics. From around 2017 to 2018, Banaji says over 30 people were killed across India by mobs incited by misinformation spread on WhatsApp. The violence was gaining more and more attention, and pressure was mounting on WhatsApp to confront the issue.
So in July 2018, WhatsApp rolled out some product changes in India to try to curb the sharing of incendiary videos and misinformation.
It was a little over a year since the first major lynching connected to WhatsApp happened. Here's WhatsApp's Will Cathcart. We said, okay, how do we approach the problem? What are the things we can do to help society deal with misinformation? One of the first things WhatsApp did was to add friction to sharing, to slow down the speed at which viral content could spread. We really latched onto, well, how easy is it to send information around and how easy is it to find alternative sources of information? So forward limits have been
the biggest change by far we've made. In India, that meant a user could only forward something to five individuals or group chats simultaneously, down from the previous limit of 100.
WhatsApp adopted similar rules worldwide six months later. It also removed a feature that allowed for quick forwarding and eventually replaced it with a Google search button to remind people to confirm something is true before forwarding it. We're not trying to jump in and say, hey, what you just said is false. But by changing the design of the product, we can make it easier to find out the truth.
than it is to quickly forward something without thinking about it. These were all important changes. But to Pranav Dixit, the company could have considered the consequences of WhatsApp's original product design sooner. That's a through line with all Silicon Valley products and platforms that have expanded into countries like India without putting in the necessary checks and balances first, without doing groundwork, without actually studying the country that they were expanding into.
For Indian regulators, though, these measures weren't enough.
After WhatsApp implemented some of the changes, the Ministry of Electronics and IT issued a statement demanding it do more. The government called for WhatsApp to filter out harmful content from the source, to trace a chain of forwards back so it could track down who was spreading violence-inducing rumors. There was one big problem, though: end-to-end encryption. One of WhatsApp's core values, a value it stuck to all along, was that it couldn't see or trace people's messages.
Nikhil Pawar is with the tech website Medianama. If WhatsApp was doing something about misinformation in terms of trying to prevent it, it would mean that they're reading the texts and that wouldn't be into an encryption.
So WhatsApp is in a very tricky situation where at one level it can't do much except at a product level to try and address misinformation. But another way... There's really nothing that they can do specifically to address misinformation on the platform. Here's what WhatsApp can do, according to Will Cathcart. Sometimes on the team we talk about it as solving a problem as an architect.
would rather than as a law enforcement officer would. I mean, architects think a lot about the design of a building, the design of a city. What can you do that will help create a safe environment or a safer environment over time, which is very different than when there's been a problem, a specific problem, how do you go deal with it? I think for some of these problems like misinformation, the
Private nature of the product has pushed us more towards architect-type solutions because you have to given how private it is. Architect-type solutions, like limiting message forwarding. But other meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they can take the kind of law enforcement approach Cathcart referenced. They're able to moderate content directly because they can see it.
In 2021, India's Ministry of Electronics and IT issued new rules requiring social media companies to identify the, quote, first originator of information when requested by the government. Essentially, a legal mandate for WhatsApp to break encryption. In response, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit to block the regulations, which is still ongoing. We're trying to make the point that undermining end-to-end encryption is actually bad.
for the things governments care about. In any free democratic society, I believe security of people's private communications is really, really, really important. One of the points we've been making is that it is ironic. I think governments are never asking us to increase the security we offer people. They're always asking us to lower it. The Indian government says it needs to root out the viral misinformation that incites violence. But the experts we talked to were skeptical of Modi's intentions.
They worried that this could be a way for the government to crack down on open political debate in the country. Shakuntala Banerjee again.
If I believed in good faith that governments really intended to trace the people who were sending the murderous messages and that they were not going to only take action against the people who were organizing pro-democracy rallies, so the people who were in some way critical of the government, then I might consider the de-encryption as an answer.
So what is the endgame? The Indian government has proven it can be serious about social media regulation. It went so far as to ban TikTok in 2020, claiming that the app was harmful to the, quote, sovereignty and integrity of India, basically because of its company's Chinese ownership. But many observers believe that despite this precedent and the ongoing legal challenges, WhatsApp isn't going away.
Pranav digs shit again. I don't think even the government wants to be in a situation where they ban WhatsApp because it's like, what are you going to replace it with? There's nothing else. Ultimately, WhatsApp is in a high-stakes face-off with the Indian government. But unlike TikTok, WhatsApp is so entrenched in India that it can't be as easily axed. At this point, both WhatsApp and the Indian government need each other. But they're each distrustful of the other's intentions.
Meta's other social networks we've talked about this season, Instagram, Facebook, they're fighting to stay relevant. WhatsApp's fight is different in that it's coming from a place of strength, which is maybe why Will Cathcart has a point when he says he believes that WhatsApp's model is the future. We've had this incredible opportunity
growth and innovation period, and social media, I think he called it town square social media. We're now seeing this incredible growth in more private communication services like WhatsApp and features like stories that have ephemerality and groups. What Cathcart means when he refers to the town square social media model is essentially the core Facebook we all know well.
Everyone shouting everything into the public arena, guided by algorithms that guess what we want to hear most. It's a square that's incredibly crowded, messy, chaotic. WhatsApp's way is instead more private, trusted, and simple. And even though it doesn't make Meta that much money, the trust users have in WhatsApp is invaluable. But WhatsApp still runs into that recurring Facebook problem of sometimes enabling the ugliest aspects of human behavior.
Throughout the course of this season, the tension we've been tracking in each of Meta's platforms comes down in a way to scale. Zuckerberg has always wanted to connect the world, to have as many people as possible using his technologies. And he's been able to do that. Made the right acquisitions, set the right growth metrics. But when it comes to considering the complexity of every culture, the trade-off of every product design, Meta hasn't always been able to think ahead.
Next week, Zuckerberg's grandest, boldest vision to date, the metaverse. In our season finale, what would it look like for Zuckerberg to invent the next era of how we connect with each other?
News clips from ABC News, CNN Business, PBS News Weekend, and Channel 9 Australia. Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption, is a production of Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is our senior producer. Oluwakemi Aladesui is our producer. Production support from Cynthia Betubiza. Jolie Myers is our editor. Richard Seema is our fact checker. Brandon McFarland composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Samantha Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief.
Jake Kasternak is his deputy editor of The Verge. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Heath. And I'm Shireen Ghaffari. If you like this episode, as always, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.