Meta Platforms-owned mobile instant messenger and social media service
WhatsApp Messenger, commonly known simply as WhatsApp, is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and Voice over IP (VoIP) service accessible via desktop and mobile app. Owned by Meta Platforms, the service allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to register. WhatsApp was launched in May 2009. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. As of May 2025, the service had 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular messenger app. The name of the app is meant to sound like "what's up".
The service was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. It became the world's most popular messaging application in 2015, with 900 million users, and had more than 2 billion active users worldwide in February 2020.
The public source identifies “WhatsApp” as meta Platforms-owned mobile instant messenger and social media service. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around WhatsApp, Meta and Platforms-owned.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1049511. VIAF identifies the subject as 12154440126535342249. The Library of Congress control number is no2019048310. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2018, 2025 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “WhatsApp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.