I live in a country where WhatsApp is heavily used for all sorts of things (business communication, personal communication, ordering food from local restaurants, and so on). I was actually surprised by how utterly replaceable it proved to be during this outage. I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least two or three messenger apps installed anyway, and since most work by the phone number, it's pretty seamless to switch to another.

I find phone number systems difficult as I use a classic phone. FB messenger seems to be broken in browser on Android too. So ironically this is hard for me. I had to jump hoops getting signal onto an android. So I am stuck in email. Once xmmp felt usable.

In your country, which messenger did most of you default to?

There's a local one which a lot of people already have installed even if they don't use it most of the time. A lot of people have Telegram installed too. WhatsApp / FB Messenger are the most popular but if they're down, between those two you would have most people covered.

I've never relied on WhatsApp but if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours.

Sure, you could try to contact people some other way (like a regular phone call) but most people don't even bother exchanging phone numbers any more, so you probably wouldn't even have someone's number unless you have their (paper) business card, or if you met them before 2012.

> if I were still living in China I cannot imagine what I'd do if WeChat suddenly stopped working for several hours

Use QQ, of course! (Except that it probably shares infra with WeChat and would be down as well!)