For about five hours, as the Facebook empire—including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp—experienced a global outage, that engine sputtered to a stop for me and billions of others. For lots of people in the U.S., the outage merely stopped them from posting food photos on Instagram and instigating mask arguments on Facebook. But it meant something else in the large swaths of the developing world. Here, WhatsApp is more than just “social media”: It’s a public utility…

Most importantly though, WhatsApp was built for the mobile phone. In the developing world in particular, users are less likely to have come to it with a preconceived notion of the internet being accessed through, say, a website on a desktop. For a lot of them, their smartphone was their first computer and WhatsApp is the internet. Two years ago, when the Lebanese government proposed a $6 monthly tax on WhatsApp, protests erupted in Beirut, forcing officials to roll back the plan hours later.

In both of the cities that I now call home, Karachi and Mexico City, countless small businesses operate entirely on WhatsApp. On billboards and flyers, it is common to find a WhatsApp number listed as the primary contact information. Customer complaints for essential services like electricity are routed through the app; small newspapers, pushed out of print, disseminate news through it; activists, such as the khwaja sirah trans community in Pakistan, use it to coordinate protests and keep others safe from harassment. All these activities were disrupted, though so were some more unsavory ones: The platform, like so many others, has a misinformation and hate-speech problem.