News written by Petteri Pyyny (January, 2020)

WhatsApp is currently experiencing a major outage. Sending normal text-based messages works fine, but sending photos or other types of media simply doesn't work - for anyone.

The problem started about an hour ago and according to various services that track uptime for services such as WhatsApp, the problem still persists.

So, if you can't currently send pictures through WhatsApp: it is not your phone's nor your operator's fault. It is the same situation for all WhatsApp users, globally.

During the past 20 years AfterDawn has been hosted on a number of different platforms. From a shared Windows server to a cluster of HP servers running Linux on 100+ cores with half a terabyte of RAM.

Most of the time we've been running of leased, physical servers, that we have sized based on the requirements at the time, and foreseeable future. Having predictable costs with a predefined hardware platform has is pros, but also its cons. Leased servers often come with lengthy, often multi-years contracts, that don't scale well as the needs change over time. Not to mention the difficulty of handling operating system upgrades or hardware issues when running on a handful of servers.

Those times are now behind us, as AfterDawn found its new home with the world's fastest cloud provider, UpCloud. We have migrated from our legacy leased servers with spinning disks and rented switch to private cloud servers backed with blazingly fast MaxIOPS storage, and software-defined network (SDN).

The entire infrastructure is orchestrated with Terraform, and all services are deployed and managed by Ansible.