WhatsApp founder apologises for outage

Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp has reportedly apologised for the four-hour outage experienced recently by all its users.

The long outage came days following acquisition of the service by Facebook in a $19 billion deal (See: Facebook to buy smartphone-messaging app WhatsApp for a staggering $16 bn). The service boasts a user base of 450 million.

According to The Verge, Koum acknowledged that it was the longest and biggest outage in years and affected all users.

The report added the outage was due to a faulty network router, which led to cascading failure and ended up hitting WhatsApp servers.

Koum gave no further details about the source of the router problems, but there was speculation that the downtime might not have been related to the new wave of publicity from the Facebook acquisition and the accompanying load on Whatsapp infrastructure.

He further assured that the company had been taking new measures with its service provider to protect against future downtime and to make sure it did not happen again.

WhatsApp was started in late 2009, by Koum, 38, and Brian Acton, 42 two years after they quit their jobs at Yahoo. Interstingly, the two had been turned down for a job with Facebook.

The WhatsApp service allows people to send text, photo or video messages to their contacts, without incurring text-messaging charges and other fees from wireless carriers.

''WhatsApp is simple, secure and fast. It does not ask you to spend time building up a new graph of your relationships; instead, it taps the one that's already there. Jan and Brian's decisions are fueled by a desire to let people communicate with no interference,'' Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital partner, WhatsApp's sole venture-capital investor.

Like Facebook in its early days, WhatsApp does not feature ads and remains ad-free.

Though WhatsApp rejects ads (users are charged 99 cents per year after the first year). WhatsApp also does not ask its users their age, gender or where they live.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said in a conference call with financial analysts he did not think ads were ''the right way'' to make money from messaging services to which Koum agreed.

Koum added, although WhatsApp was profitable, making money ''is not going to be a priority for us.''