Americans Had It Easy During the Facebook Outage
WhatsApp is the digital scaffolding for much of the global South.
Before WhatsApp went dark yesterday, the last messages I sent were to my editor in London, my doctor here in Mexico City, and to the family group chat, asking whether my father—recovering from COVID-19 back home in Pakistan—had finally tested negative. For me, is as much a verb as , and the platform is the engine that fuels my personal and professional lives. Sometimes, despite being thousands of miles away from my family, my WhatsApp groups seem like the rooms of my childhood house: Here is my mother in one corner, fretting over my father’s cavalier attitude toward the
