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iPhone 4 and 4s users will be faced with similar issues for the same reasons. The main models that are going to be affected are the iPhone 5 and 5c, which can run iOS 11 but can’t run iOS 12 or any other subsequent operating system released by Apple. Time is better spent working on things like vital security updates for more widely-used versions of iOS.
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Companies that produce software regularly make difficult decisions regarding when to stop rolling out updates for older iterations of operating systems.Įven for a company the size of Meta, with a huge team of employees working on WhatsApp, it doesn’t make sense to keep updating apps for iOS models that progressively fewer people are actually using. WhatsApp has confirmed that users of iOS 11 and older have until Octoto upgrade their OS or face being blocked out of WhatsApp on their devices.Īpps discontinuing support for outdated OS models is quite a common practice. WhatsApp Waves Goodbye to Old iOS Versions Precisely how many of those users will be impacted by this news, however, remains unclear. WhatsApp, which recently launched an in-app, end-to-end ecommerce service in India, has over 2 billion active users globally. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, has confirmed that it will be dropping support for any iPhone devices that cannot run iOS 12 or above. “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them,” it wrote on its communications page.Some iPhone users with WhatsApp accounts have just over a month to upgrade their Apple devices or face losing the ability to use the messaging app for good. The same statement was posted shortly after on the official Facebook Twitter page. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter. To sign up to our breaking email alerts click hereĪ company spokesperson said that it apologised for the problem but gave no indication of why the outage began or how long it might take to fix. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, he said, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.
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In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg noted that such outages are a “big deal”.
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In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”. The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues, and does not tend to explain them even after they are fixed. Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.
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