WhatsApp
Communication
WhatsApp

Minimalist Erlang/BEAM architecture serving 2B+ users with extreme efficiency

Employees:1,000+
Revenue:Part of Meta
Founded:2009
HQ:Menlo Park, CA
Ticker:META
Key Metrics
Users2B+ users
Uptime99.999%
Latency<100ms
Messages/Day100B+
Engineers (2014)50
Users per Engineer40M
Tech Stack
Erlang
BEAM VM
Mnesia
FreeBSD
Hot Code Loading
Signal Protocol
System Architecture

Minimalist Erlang/BEAM

WhatsApp Architecture

Erlang-Powered Messaging

Mobile Clients

iOS
Objective-C, Swift
Android
Java, Kotlin
WhatsApp Web
React

Connection Layer

Custom XMPP Protocol
Erlang, TLS

Erlang Backend

Message Router
Erlang, BEAM
Presence
Erlang
Media Server
Erlang
Group Messaging
Erlang

Data Layer

Mnesia
Distributed DB
Media Storage
FreeBSD
E2E Encrypted

Key Components

BEAM Virtual Machine

Erlang VM enabling massive concurrency with lightweight processes

Erlang
BEAM
OTP
Signal Protocol

End-to-end encryption for all messages and calls

Curve25519
AES-256
HMAC-SHA256

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Sources

https://engineering.fb.com/tag/whatsapp/https://www.whatsapp.com/about

Last updated: 2024-12-01