Dev Tools · 1h ago
How WhatsApp's Tiny Team Handles Billions of Messages Daily
WhatsApp's small engineering team processes billions of messages daily using persistent connections and Erlang's concurrency. Messages are stored only temporarily until delivered, then deleted from servers. End-to-end encryption via the Signal protocol ensures servers act as dumb routers of encrypted blobs.
Meridian48 take
The piece glosses over multi-device and backup challenges that took years to solve, but the core architectural decisions remain a masterclass in scaling with minimal resources.
whatsapp-architectureerlang-scaling