Facebook has decided to move the massive WhatsApp data from IBM Cloud to its own data centres.
According to a report in CNBC on Wednesday, Facebook-owned WhatsApp, used by 1.2 billion people across the globe, has been one of IBM’s top five public cloud customers in terms of revenue and was at one point spending $2 million a month with IBM.
“WhatsApp has been a great client of IBM Cloud as they used our global footprint and capabilities to scale their business,” IBM was quoted as saying.
“We are proud of the role of IBM Cloud in their success. It is completely natural for Facebook to seek synergies across their business,” the tech giant added.
According to Synergy Research, IBM’s public cloud business lags behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is on top with 33 per cent of the market in April, as well as Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and left the app running on the servers it has always used.
When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, it was already in the process of migrating its Instagram photo-sharing app which it acquired in 2012, from AWS to its own data centres.
WhatsApp on May 18 encountered an outage with users across the globe reporting problems accessing the service.
Issues with the Facebook-owned app, which is used by 1 billion people worldwide, included sending and receiving messages and logging in, the Independent reported.
According to monitoring website Down Detector, hundreds of people complained about the outage from Malaysia to Spain. Other severely affected countries included Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain.
Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) will fine Facebook 110 million euros ($122 million) for providing incorrect or misleading information in connection with the 2014 purchase of mobile messaging service WhatsApp.
At the time of the acquisition, Facebook told European Commission (EC) competition monitors that it was not technically possible to automatically link WhatsApp user data with Facebook profiles but this later transpired to be incorrect information that Facebook staff had knowingly handed over.
