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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

The sad thought crossed my mind: people using Whatsapp to have last calls with family members dying of e.g. COVID, trying terribly to get onto telegram or something but having no luck getting through since everything was degraded.

Kinda ruined the few hours of fun for me.

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People dying of COVID are usually heavily sedated with a tube down their tracheae.

They don’t have last words, they either get better or die.

Assuming you have never faced the above situation (and I pray you don't). It goes something like this:

1. on call nurse txts "its time"

2. you confirm that he/she will initiate a call in 20 mins over whatsapp/viber/messenger

3. The nurse holds up the ipad over your loved one's face

That's heartbreaking

In fact, they often have terribly ordinary last words, i.e. whatever they said immediately prior to what they thought was a temporary intubation.

I seriously doubt those people couldn't just call normally instead

International calls might be too expensive unfortunately.

The phone call might be right before ventilation rather than last words too.

In many circumstances, WhatsApp works better -- like, a lot better -- than normal calls. Also it's often subsidized.

They probably could have paid extra money out of pocket to call normally and get a substandard experience.

Normal telecom services do not offer free international calls or video conferencing like WhatsApp. You also would need a sim card and phone plan. WhatsApp just requires wifi.

I imagine that developing countries were affected the worse, although that particular scenario is sad, I can't help but think of all the lost revenue that families/small businesses suffered because this outage.

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