These are tough times as the nation faces an imminent threat from the novel coronavirus pandemic. Countries across the world are on lockdown. Lives are being lost. People are in isolation or quarantine in fear of the rapidly-spreading disease. There are rising concerns about the shortage of PPEs and ventilators. Amidst all the tensions, people are coping with the lockdown by staying in touch with their loved ones digitally and WhatsApp is a major source of that in India.
WhatsApp has more than 200 million active users in India, making it the biggest market for the Facebook-owned messaging app. With so many people in lockdown, the usage of the app for chatting, calling (both voice and video) is on the rise. As a result, this is putting the load on the servers like never before, which is forcing the company to impose some restrictions.
WhatsApp Status restriction
WhatsApp is trying to reduce the traffic on servers by imposing a minor restriction on statuses. WhatsApp users in India won't be allowed to post videos longer than 15 seconds as a Status, WABetaInfo reported.
When a user in India tries to upload a video longer than 15 seconds, there will be an error message saying: "Videos sent to My Status will be trimmed to the first 15 seconds."
Users can choose which 15 seconds of the video you wish to post as a status as it won't automatically choose the first 15 seconds. Users can slide the rectangular seek box over the frames to select the necessary portion of the video.
WhatsApp hasn't officially announced the change yet, but it is being slowly rolled out to users. Even if you are able to post videos longer than 16 seconds, you won't be able to soon as and when the restriction is imposed.
Upcoming WhatsApp features
WhatsApp recently rolled out the long-overdue dark mode to all of its users, but there's more coming. WhatsApp is testing some interesting features such as disappearing messages, multiple device support, dark mode for web, face unlock for Android users and more. But there's no word on when we can expect these to arrive.
