In this article, we’ll take a technical dive into how WhatsApp built its architecture and the challenges the engineering team faced during this journey.

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WhatsApp manages to handle nearly 40 billion daily messages by utilizing a robust backend architecture with simplicity, asynchronicity, and isolation at its core. Erlang is pivotal, offering lightweight concurrency, fault isolation, and efficient message routing. The architecture benefits from smart partitioning, resiliency under failures, seamless upgrades, and focused quality control, all managed by a small engineering team. Database design favors speed with in-memory key-value stores and async writes, while backend systems are structurally isolated to ensure reliability.

How WhatsApp Handles 40 Billion Messages Per Day

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<p>Fascinating that a modern chat app uses a technology developed by Ericsson to run phone exchanges in the 80’s. Just shows how well designed and executed technology can have a useful life for decades.</p>
<p>I did a quick search and it’s also used by Goldman Sachs for high-frequency trading and for League of Legends chat. Also by CouchDB.</p>
