Facebook Acquires WhatsApp
Published:
Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014 for approximately $19 billion in cash and stock, an extraordinary valuation for a messaging company with a small engineering team.
WhatsApp’s technical achievement was operating a huge real-time messaging service with relatively little infrastructure and staff. The service used a heavily customized Erlang-based backend, a language and runtime designed around lightweight processes, message passing, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
The acquisition also highlighted a strategic shift away from public social feeds toward private mobile communication. Messaging apps were becoming platforms in their own right, handling photos, groups, voice calls, and eventually payments and business communication.