LINE has never been one to back down or fail to point out where the competition needs work after they’ve suffered an outage or two. Back in July, WeChat’s outage spurred LINE into action.
This time, it’s WhatsApp that’s getting pushed through the ringer, but instead of simply spotlighting a competitor’s shortcomings, LINE has instead spotlighted their application’s growth as a result of WhatsApp’s major outage that occurred over the weekend.
LINE growth spiked to five times that of normal growth levels post Facebook acquisition
It turns out that LINE directly benefited from the outage, as well as the recent acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook (which has many users concerned over privacy) with a new daily record of 2 million new users logged in just 24 hours after WhatsApp’s network outage. The new registrations spiked at five times their normal rates during the outage in North America, South America, and Europe.
According to LINE, the outage and continued privacy concerns “proves why LINE is a stronger and safer alternative” to many other mobile messaging apps and startups, though it hasn’t been without its own security flaws in the past. The point the company is trying to make, though, is that no outage occurred for its users, even with the spike of new sign-ups over the weekend.
LINE assures that its users “can rest assured their personal information and privacy is safe. LINE ensures the highest level of security for mobile messaging applications through total encryption of messages, and utilizes a global standard operational system, which allows LINE to securely handle over 9.2 billion messages per day.”
“Our growth strategy has always included providing a strong network that can handle unplanned and unexpected increases in network traffic. We pride ourselves on providing a safe, secure platform that will always work when our users need it the most,” said Jeanie Han, CEO of LINE Euro-Americas. “This last weekend was proof of how strong LINE can be. Even with a sudden, record-breaking increase in users and traffic, we were able to provide the best, most reliable and secure service to all our members.”
In 2013, LINE received SOC2, SOC3 and SysTrust certification based on availability, processing, confidentiality, and protection of personal information to ensure its users its system is reliable. This, says the company, along with the high level of network encryption, ensures LINE is one of the most secure messaging networks that places a high value on the privacy of its users.