When was WhatsApp launched?

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who had both worked at Yahoo, founded WhatsApp in 2009, with the name a play on the phrase “what’s up”. It began as an app for showing status updates next to contacts but quickly became a free messaging service that used the internet instead of costly text messages. That appeal made it hugely popular, especially in countries where SMS was expensive. In February 2014 Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for about $19 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions ever at the time. End-to-end encryption was rolled out to all users in 2016, and the app passed two billion users in 2020.