Text messages up by 655%: digitec connect during the Whatsapp outage
It’s 6 p.m. on a Monday evening, and millions of users can no longer use their favourite apps. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp would remain shut down for several hours. And just like that, text messages became popular again.
The yoga group from Hintertupfingen (wherever that is) is in a fix. Nothing is working; WhatsApp is broken, no messages can be sent or received. Same thing on Facebook – the boomer network is down, as is the influencer locale Instagram.
How is the desperate yoga group supposed to communicate now?
Enter the text message.
A sevenfold rise in text messages on the digitec connect network
The use of SMS – Short Message Service – has been in decline since 2012. But yesterday, an unprecedented increase in text messages was recorded. Our need for communication is apparently so great that in times of need we resort to means otherwise threatened with extinction.Thomas Peter, project manager and the person responsible for digitec connect, sent me the impressive figures.
- There was an increase of 654.77% compared to the same period on the previous day (between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m.).
- During the eight-hour-long outage (6 p.m. to 2 a.m.), the same number of text messages were sent as are usually sent in 2.5 days.
- During peak times from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., eleven times the normal traffic was recorded.
Here’s what the increase looks like visualised:
Unfortunately, Thomas isn’t allowed to share any concrete figures. But according to him, an increase like this is no problem for the system. «We weathered the SMS storm well,» he says.
Phone calls were not quite as popular
Some people also turned to phone calls during the outage, but the figures are not nearly as impressive as those for text messages.
- There was an increase of 143.69% compared to the same period on the previous day.
This corresponds to more than twice as many phone calls compared to the same period on the previous day.
No correlation with digitec and Galaxus sales figures
The assumption that more people have more time for shopping because of the outage sounds plausible enough. But this wasn’t the case. On the contrary, the figures from our digital department paint a different picture: all user sessions and sales remained the same. Transactions, i.e. completed orders, also remained at an absolutely unremarkable level.
Several analyses have also shown that neither digitec.ch nor galaxus.ch recorded more page impressions or traffic during the outage. The numbers have remained at the expected level for a typical Monday.
Those who didn’t have any yoga appointments to plan via text messages seem to have been occupied otherwise.
Testing devices and gadgets is my thing. Some experiments lead to interesting insights, others to demolished phones. I’m hooked on series and can’t imagine life without Netflix. In summer, you’ll find me soaking up the sun by the lake or at a music festival.