14 DAY TRIAL // In recent months, Facebook has repeatedly been accused of stealing ideas from Snapchat, but in the end, WhatsApp Status has turned out to be more popular than Snapchat itself.
WhatsApp Status, as you may know, is Facebook's version of Snapchat's Stories feature. This tool now has 175 million daily users, Facebook revealed during the first quarter earnings call. By comparison, Snapchat Stories has 161 million daily users, according to the latest numbers from the company. Ironically, another tool that's seen as a clone, Instagram Stories, is also more popular than Snapchat, with 200 million daily users.
Overall, WhatsApp is now incredibly popular with some 1.2 billion monthly users.
WhatsApp's Status feature was introduced at the end of February and has rapidly grown in popularity among the 1.2 billion WhatsApp users. While the sheer number of users that can use Status simply by using WhatsApp is one of the major factors behind the feature's growing popularity, it should also be noted that Snapchat user experience on Android devices isn't exactly the best.
Facebook has not released any information about the numbers it has for other similar "clones" - Messenger Day and Facebook Stories, but those are probably climbing too.
Problems in WhatsApp-land
Today isn't a great day for WhatsApp, it seems, as the popular app is currently facing some downtime and has been down for several hours already. The issues affect users in the United States, Europe, and South American countries primarily, although cases have been reported even in Hong Kong.
The company is aware of the issue and working to solve the problem, but has yet to mention what has caused the outage. Hopefully, the network will return to its proper status soon enough and we'll get a full explanation.