If you experienced WhatsApp down it probably wasn’t because of a slow WiFi connection. There have been several instances from across Pakistan that WhatsApp went offline between 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM today. This is the third time it has happened in one week alone.
The service is now up and running. WhatsApp went down on Wednesday this past week and a small stint was also observed yesterday. Pakistan appears to be the only country being affected by these ‘WhatsApp Outages’.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Agency has said that they have nothing to do with it and the Internet Service Providers also remain clueless. This year alone has seen several episodes of WhatsApp going down but the reason remains unknown. Could it possibly have something to do with the WhatsApp’s new feature that encrypts all the messages, as this one Twitter user suggests?
And #whatsapp back after 3rd outage in a week in #Pakistan clearly someone somewhere not to happy with encryption
— norbalm (@norbalm) May 22, 2016
However, it would not be wrong of people to assume this. After all the Telecom Policy 2015 suggests that certain apps will have to get a ‘No Objection Certificate’ in order to remain functional in Pakistan. To do that, these apps will have to pay a certain fee and allow the Pakistani government access to all communication between users.
However, as we clearly saw in the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, Apple refused to crack their iPhone for the FBI. So, we are not entirely sure WhatsApp and other apps would compromise their users privacy this easily.
