I mean, honestly the way we built WhatsApp 10 years ago is pretty similar to how we would have built it 20 years ago... except that we'd probably have had to move towards dedicated colo space, instead of 'managed hosting' bare metal. I think we may have ended up going that way if we didn't get acquired and move into FB datacenters.
SMS aggregators were certainly around in 2000, just as well as in 2010 and 2020 ... although they've got fancier webpages now.
I mean, you can outsource a bunch of stuff, but we just didn't use very much. You can't outsource the core product and deliver reliability, and we didn't have much that isn't the core product. SMS verification was only reliable (ish) because we used several providers with real time statistics guiding the choice. (Of course, some of the providers use the other providers, so it's very messy)
I mean, honestly the way we built WhatsApp 10 years ago is pretty similar to how we would have built it 20 years ago... except that we'd probably have had to move towards dedicated colo space, instead of 'managed hosting' bare metal. I think we may have ended up going that way if we didn't get acquired and move into FB datacenters.
SMS aggregators were certainly around in 2000, just as well as in 2010 and 2020 ... although they've got fancier webpages now.
I mean, you can outsource a bunch of stuff, but we just didn't use very much. You can't outsource the core product and deliver reliability, and we didn't have much that isn't the core product. SMS verification was only reliable (ish) because we used several providers with real time statistics guiding the choice. (Of course, some of the providers use the other providers, so it's very messy)