The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark

Note: As usual, tl;dr at the end. Tomorrow morning, WhatsApp goes dark, and it’s not just a short downtime, but it is a termination of the service. The servers turn off, the domains don’t resolve anymore and no mobile client is able to connect. Have you ever asked yourself what would happen in that case? What if WhatsApp actually went dark? Obviously, nobody really knows what would happen in such a case, because we haven’t experienced that situation (yet), but even though the closest analogues like the six-hour Meta outage in October 2021, and Brazil’s 12-hour court-ordered shutdown in December 2015 were measured in hours, not days, those already produced effects that journalists described as “apocalyptic”. We can try to extrapolate what happened throughout events like those to see what “global catastrophe scenario” could theoretically look like. Because whether you believe it or not, WhatsApp is more than just a messenger, and one example that makes this pretty obvious came from the…