The consequences were striking for the 3.51 billion monthly active users claimed by Facebook worldwide for all its services. It was thus impossible to send messages with the WhatsApp messaging service, which is nevertheless overseas chinese in australia data very widely used in certain developing countries, such as India, where it plays the role of SMS. Some users found themselves on the social network Twitter to exchange or joke about the inaccessibility of Facebook services. At the same time, the Telegram messaging service went from 56th to 5th place among the most downloaded free applications in the United States, according to the specialist firm SensorTower, while Signal welcomed "a sharp increase in registrations" .
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At Facebook, employees could no longer even access the buildings of its California headquarters in Menlo Park because their badges no longer allowed them to open the doors.
Compared to many services, and in particular other social networking platforms, WhatsApp actually collects relatively little information about its users: in addition to the phone number, the list of contacts, the profile picture and an approximate geolocation, the messaging service mainly records the metadata of exchanges (their time, the numbers of the participants in a discussion), but not their content, which is encrypted by default.
This update to the terms of use comes a little less than a year after a change to the rules of use that was very poorly received by a significant portion of the application's users. A rather technical update to the rules, described in a threatening manner by early messages announcing that users who refused them would soon no longer be able to use the application, had then provoked a major protest movement and an exodus of some users to other messaging services.
