Texting and calling cost a lot more: Sending an SMS in 2015 was 22 times more expensive in India than in the United States in Brazil, it was 55 times as expensive. Today, not only is the service entirely free, but telecom companies in many countries offer data bundles that include WhatsApp and Facebook at little or no added cost, partly made possible through a controversial Facebook initiative known as Free Basics. For a homesick student contemplating candy and canned beans for dinner every other night, it was a pretty good deal. At the time, it operated on a subscription model: In some countries, it cost roughly $1 to download, equivalent to the cost of a handful of international text messages. I first downloaded the app when I moved away for college in 2008, six years before it was acquired by Facebook, for a whopping $19 billion. Here, WhatsApp is more than just “social media”: It’s a public utility. But it meant something else in the large swaths of the developing world. For lots of people in the U.S., the outage merely stopped them from posting food photos on Instagram and instigating mask arguments on Facebook. Sometimes, despite being thousands of miles away from my family, my WhatsApp groups seem like the rooms of my childhood house: Here is my mother in one corner, fretting over my father’s cavalier attitude toward the pandemic here is an uncle nobody likes, talking about some secret conspiracy against Islam here are my cousins sending voice notes laced with laughter, virtually re-creating a summer sleepover here is my grandmother, reminding me to pray.įor about five hours, as the Facebook empire-including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp-experienced a global outage, that engine sputtered to a stop for me and billions of others. For me, WhatsApp is as much a verb as Google, and the platform is the engine that fuels my personal and professional lives. Reverted to version as of 15:01, 5 April 2018 (UTC) Colour in previous version does not match the WhatsApp brand guidelines as provided.Before WhatsApp went dark yesterday, the last messages I sent were to my editor in London, my doctor here in Mexico City, and to the family group chat, asking whether my father-recovering from COVID-19 back home in Pakistan-had finally tested negative. Reverted to version as of 18:26, 21 July 2019 (UTC) because I checked, it's better this one :v Lossless recompression via SVGOMG & vecta.io/nano, & verified via SVGCheck A normal copyright tag is still required. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. If you want to use it, you have to ensure that you have the legal right to do so and that you do not infringe any trademark rights. This work includes material that may be protected as a trademark in some jurisdictions. This image of simple geometry is ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain, because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship. See COM:CRT/United States#Threshold of originality for more information. However, some logos and trademarks are copyrighted in the United States. There are some cases that even logos and trademarks that have been judged to be copyrighted in foreign countries have also been judged not to be copyrighted in the United States. There are many logos and trademarks in the United States that are not protected by copyright because they are below the threshold of originality required for copyright protection.
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