WhatsApp
users on Wednesday were shocked, when they found everyone on their
contact lists with their status field listed as “error: status unavailable”
and then got a abrupt message from the CEO of the company
complaining about how they weren’t making money and you need to
forward the message to all your contacts to prove that you are a
legitimate user.
Thankfully
though there’s little to worry about: WhatsApp remains free to use,
the CEO doesn’t hate as you as much as you thought from his message
and it was just a spam message that made the rounds as a feature of
the messaging service was affected.
However
within few hours a message had begun to circulate on the messaging
service saying the service was to become paid and that you need to
forward the message to stay on the service for free:
“Message
from Jim Balsamic (CEO of Whatsapp): we have had an over usage of
user names on whatsapp Messenger. We are requesting all users to
forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not
forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and
it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. Please DO NOT ignore
this message or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If
you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a
charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill.”
And
since everyone loves getting/using things for free, the message did
the rounds with most people forwarding it to all their contacts.
However, while the status message update feature has been restored to
normal on some phones it is still displaying the error message on
others.
If
you still have the error message, you’ll just have to wait for it
to be restored to normal.
