Iran has reinstated access to WhatsApp and Google Play after more than two years of restrictions, according to a report by the official IRNA news agency on Tuesday. The decision was made by the Supreme Council of Cyber Space during a meeting led by reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has pledged to ease social media restrictions. Telecommunication Minister Sattar Heshemi described the move as a "first step" in lifting online restrictions. He hinted at the possibility of restoring access to more platforms in the future. Residents in Tehran and other cities confirmed they could access the services on computers, although mobile access was not yet available. Meta set to introduce Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 WhatsApp ranks as Iran’s third most popular messaging app, following Instagram and Telegram. The platforms were initially blocked in 2022 during widespread protests over the death of a woman detained by morality police for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress code. The unrest subsided in 2023 after a harsh government crackdown, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests. Iran has a history of restricting social media access, but many citizens bypass these bans using proxies and VPNs.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today (March 23, 2023) announced the launching of a new WhatsApp desktop app for Windows. “Now you can make E2E encrypted video calls with up to 8 people and audio calls with up to 32 people,” Zuckerberg posted on his verified Facebook profile. In a recent blog post, Meta said: “We’ll continue to increase these limits over time so you can always stay connected with friends, family, and coworkers.” The tech giant also announced that its instant messaging app for Windows has got a revamped look with new features. Read More: Meta slashes another 10,000 jobs “The new WhatsApp app for Windows will load faster and is built with an interface similar to the mobile version of the app,” the blog post reads. “We’ve made improvements to device linking and better syncing across multiple devices,” Meta said. To avail the new features, the users have to install the latest update of the WhatsApp Windows desktop app. Once updated, A call option in the chat box – similar to the call icon available in WhatsApp app on Android or iOS – will be visible to the users Meta also announced the new Mac desktop version of the app, which is currently in beta testing. Read More: WhatsApp Communities: Here’s what the latest feature offers Prioritizing the privacy of the users in mind, WhatsApp has rolled out a new feature that gives group admins more control over their group privacy. “As more people join communities, we want to give group admins more control over their group privacy, so we’ve built a simple tool that gives admins the ability to decide who is able to join a group,” Meta said in another blog post.

Facebook parent Meta is slashing another 10,000 jobs and will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs. The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November, about 13% of its workforce at the time. Meta and other tech companies have been hiring aggressively for at least two years and in recent months have begun to let some of those workers go. Early last month, Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue. The company said Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, and then its business groups in late May. “This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.” The Menlo Park, California, company has invested billions of dollars to realign its focus on the metaverse. In February it said a downturn in online advertising and competition from rivals such as TikTok weighed on results. “As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs -- and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” said Zuckerberg. The biggest tech companies in the U.S. are cutting costs elsewhere, too. This month, Amazon paused construction on its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history and its shifting plans around remote work. In early trading, Meta shares rose 6%.

Meta-owned messaging service WhatsApp rolled out “Communities” — a new feature offering larger, more structured discussion groups — today. The feature will bring together separate groups under bigger umbrellas where administrators can send alerts to a community of thousands. Designed to help organisations, clubs, schools, and other private groups communicate better, this latest feature will allow people to receive updates sent to the entire community and easily organise smaller discussion groups. Read: WhatsApp services restored after longest reported outage "Today we're launching Communities on WhatsApp. It makes groups better by enabling sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels, and more," Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message today. “We're also rolling out polls and 32-person video calling too. All are secured by end-to-end encryption so your messages stay private,” Zuckerberg added. WhatsApp will now allow chat groups to have up to 1,024 users, much higher than the 256 participants restriction it had until recently, according to a company statement. Read: WhatsApp pushes privacy update to comply with Irish ruling Telegram and Discord, rivals of WhatsApp, allow thousands of members in group chats. According to Meta's Twitter handle, WhatsApp's new feature will be available to everyone over the next few months.

After the longest reported downtime, WhatsApp messaging services are now operational again. For approximately 90 minutes, the instant messaging service was not available. Users reported receiving all messages now that WhatsApp is officially up and running. WhatsApp is currently functional on WhatsApp Web, Android, and iOS apps. Although some users claim that services on WhatsApp Web are still not functioning, phone app should be functional. Read WhatsApp down: Users report not being able to send, receive messages Many worldwide use WhatsApp, a popular messaging service owned by Meta, to send rapid texts. Earlier today, WhatsApp experienced a significant outage that lasted for about two hours. This prevented millions of WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages globally. WhatsApp earlier claimed that it was working to resume operations. “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” a Meta spokesperson has said. Read Users report not able to send, receive messages Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all owned by the US-based firm Meta.

Users in several countries, including in Bangladesh, are reporting problems with WhatsApp’s text sending and receiving capabilities – suggesting that the app may be experiencing a bug. The number of people reporting the outage of WhatsApp has sharply increased, according to Downdetector, a website that measures online outages throughout the world. According to the BBC, users in the UK cannot access the messaging service. Italian and Turkish social media users both complained about not being able to send messages on WhatsApp. Read Users report not able to send, receive messages According to Downdetector, more than 11,000 users in India have reported a WhatsApp outage, compared to 68,000 in the UK and 19,000 in Singapore, as of 7:50GMT (Bangladesh time 1:50pm). WhatsApp has claimed that it is working to resume operations. “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” a Meta spokesperson has said. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all owned by the US-based firm Meta.  Read Top WhatsApp Alternatives for Free Calling and Group Chatting

WhatsApp is adding more details to its privacy policy and flagging that information for European users, after Irish regulators slapped the chat service with a record fine for breaching strict EU data privacy rules. Starting Monday, WhatsApp's privacy policy will be reorganized to provide more information on the data it collects and how it's used. The company said it's also explaining in more detail how it protects data shared across borders for its global service and the legal foundations for processing the data. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, now renamed Meta Platforms. With the update, users in Europe will see a banner notification at the top of their chat list that will take them to the new information. Read:Ohio retirement fund sues Facebook over investment loss WhatsApp is taking the action after getting hit with a record 225 million euro ($267 million) fine in September from Ireland’s data privacy watchdog for violating stringent European Union data protection rules on transparency about sharing people’s data with other Facebook companies. The chat service said it disagreed with the decision, but it has to comply by updating its policy while it appeals. The update doesn’t affect how data is handled, and users won’t have to agree to anything new or take any other action. Ireland's Data Privacy Commission is the lead privacy regulator for WhatsApp under European Union rules because its regional headquarters is in Dublin. Read:Facebook to shut down face-recognition system, delete data WhatsApp was embroiled in a separate privacy controversy earlier this year when it botched a different update to its privacy policy that raised concerns users were being forced to agree to share more of their data with Facebook. That update sparked a backlash from users who switched to rival services like Telegram and Signal, an investigation by Turkey's competition watchdog, a temporary German ban on gathering data, and a complaint by EU consumer groups. A six-hour outage of Facebook services last month highlighted how vital WhatsApp has become for its more than 2 billion users worldwide.

The six-hour outage at Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp was a headache for many casual users but far more serious for the millions of people worldwide who rely on the social media sites to run their businesses or communicate with relatives, fellow parents, teachers or neighbors. When all three services went dark Monday, it was a stark reminder of the power and reach of Facebook, which owns the photo-sharing and messaging apps. Around the world, the breakdown at WhatsApp left many at a loss. In Brazil, the messaging service is by far the most widely used app in the country, installed on 99% of smartphones, according to tech pollster Mobile Time. WhatsApp has become essential in Brazil to communicate with friends and family, as well as for a variety of other tasks, such as ordering food. Offices, various services and even the courts had trouble making appointments, and phone lines became overwhelmed. Read: Facebook services restored after worldwide outage Hundreds of thousands of Haitians in their homeland and abroad fretted over the WhatsApp outage. Many of the country’s more than 11 million people depend it to alert one another about gang violence in particular neighborhoods or to talk to relatives in the U.S. about money transfers and other important matters. Haitian migrants traveling to the U.S. rely on it to find each other or share key information such as safe places to sleep. Nelzy Mireille, a 35-year-old unemployed woman who depends on money sent from relatives abroad, said she stopped at a repair shop in the capital of Port-au-Prince because she thought her phone was malfunctioning. “I was waiting on confirmation on a money transfer from my cousin,” she said. “I was so frustrated.” “I was not able to hear from my love,” complained 28-year-old Wilkens Bourgogne, referring to his partner, who was in the neighboring Dominican Republic, buying goods to bring back to Haiti. He said he was concerned about her safety because of the violence in their homeland. “Insecurity makes everyone worry,” he said. In rebel-held Syria, where the telecommunication infrastructure has been disrupted by war, residents and emergency workers rely mostly on internet communication. Naser AlMuhawish, a Turkey-based Syrian doctor who monitors coronavirus cases in rebel-held territory in Syria, said WhatsApp is the main communication method used with over 500 workers in the field. They switched to Skype, but WhatsApp works better when internet service is shaky, he said. If there had been an emergency such as shelling that he needed to warn field workers about, there could have been major problems, he said. "Luckily this didn’t happen yesterday during the outage,” he said. But hospitals treating COVID-19 patients in the region were thrown into panic. They lost contact with oxygen suppliers who have no fixed location and are normally reached via WhatsApp. One hospital sent staff member searching for oxygen at nearly two dozen facilities, said Dr. Fadi Hakim of the Syrian American Medical Society. In Lima, Peru, the breakdown complicated dental technician Mary Mejia’s job. Like most Peruvian medical workers, she uses WhatsApp for a multitude of tasks, including scheduling appointments and ordering crowns. “Sometimes the doctor will be working on a patient and I need to contact a technician for job,” she said. “To have to step away and make a phone call? It trips us up. We’ve become so accustomed to this tool.” Millions of Africans use WhatsApp for all their voice calls, so “people felt they were cut off from the world,” said Mark Tinka, a Ugandan who heads engineering at SEACOM, a South Africa-based internet infrastructure company. Read:Whistleblower: Facebook chose profit over public safety Many Africans also use WhatsApp to connect with relatives in other countries. Tinka’s stepdaughter lives in Caldwell, Idaho, and lost her father on Sunday, but could not speak with her family back in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, to arrange travel for the funeral. “It’s amazing just how little folks understand the impact of three or four content companies on the utility of the Internet,” Tinka said. Facebook said the outage was due to an internal error related to a “configuration change” but gave no details. The outage came amid a crisis at Facebook, accused by a whistleblower on “60 Minutes” and on Capitol Hill of profiting from hate and division and suppressing research showing that Instagram contributes to body-image problems, eating disorders and thoughts of suicide in young women. For small businesses, the outages meant hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Andrawos Bassous is a Palestinian photographer in the Israeli-occupied West Bank whose Facebook page has more than 1 million followers. He has worked with companies including Samsung and Turkish Airlines to create social media content. He said the social media blackout meant he was unable to book appointments or share videos online for companies that employ him. “Imagine if you promised one of the companies you work for to share their product at a specific time and there is a blackout,” Bassous said. Sarah Murdoch runs a small Seattle-based travel company called Adventures with Sarah and relies on Facebook Live videos to promote her tours. She estimated the breakdown cost her thousands of dollars in bookings. “I’ve tried other platforms because I am wary of Facebook, but none of them are as powerful for the type of content I create,” Murdoch said. As for her losses, “it may only be a few people, but we are small enough that it hurts.” Heather Rader runs How Charming Photography in Linton, Indiana. She takes photographs for schools and sports teams and makes yard signs with the photos. She has her own website but said parents and other customers mostly try to reach her through social media. She said she might have lost three or four bookings for photo sessions at $200 a client. “A lot of people only have a specific window when they can do ordering and booking and things like that,” she said. “If they can’t get a direct answer, they go to someone else.” Read: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage Tarita Carnduff of Alberta, Canada, said she connects with other parents on Facebook just about every day, and the outage drove home for her how crucial that support is. “As a parent with special needs kids, it is the only space I found others in similar positions,” she said. “There’s a lot of us that would be lost without it.” But for others, the breakdown led them to conclude they need less Facebook in their lives. Anne Vydra said she realized she was spending too much free time scrolling and commenting on posts she disagreed with. She deleted the Facebook app on Tuesday. “I didn’t want it to come back,” said Vydra, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and does voiceover work. She added: “I realized how much of my time was wasted.”

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were down in parts of the world on Monday. The company said it was “aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app” and it was working on restoring access. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:45 ET. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York and Europe.

California-headquartered WhatsApp has taken the Indian government to court over the country's new digital rules that make it mandatory for all instant messaging apps to trace the origin of all chats sent on their platforms.    Interestingly, in January this year, the Indian government asked the instant messaging app to withdraw its new policy on information sharing with parent firm Facebook.         In its petition filed in the Delhi High Court, WhatsApp has claimed that the new digital rules are not only against the company's data-protection policy but also undermine people's right to privacy. India is WhatsApp's biggest market.   The Facebook-owned instant messaging app has also urged the court to scrap the new rules as "a violation of privacy under the Constitution of India".   "Requiring messaging apps to 'trace' chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people's right to privacy,"  it said.   "We have consistently joined civil society and experts around the world in opposing requirements that would violate the privacy of our users," the social media app said in a statement issued on Wednesday.   "In the meantime, we will also continue to engage with the government of India on practical solutions aimed at keeping people safe, including responding to valid legal requests for the information available to us," a spokesperson for WhatsApp said. Also read: India unveils WhatsApp alternative, Sandes   Last year, WhatsApp rolled out notifications informing users about an update in its 'Terms of Service' that allows the app to share data with Facebook. WhatsApp initially gave users time till February 8 to agree to the policy to continue using the service, but later deferred it. Also read:India asks WhatsApp to withdraw new privacy policy   A couple of months later -- that is in January this year -- the Indian government asked WhatsApp to immediately withdraw the "discriminatory" policy for this country's users in the wake of a huge backlash against the social media platform.