WhatsApp Status Video Reportedly Cannot be Longer than 15 Seconds in India during Coronavirus Lockdown

WhatsApp status video in India, a feature that is used by millions of users of the platform, has now apparently been restricted to 15 seconds. This move is most likely a temporary one expected to last as long as there is a Coronavirus lockdown in the country. The earlier limit for WhatsApp status video was 30 seconds.

With millions of Internet users in the country, it is likely that there has been extensive pressure on Internet servers due to the 21 days lockdown period. Consequently, WhatsApp may have taken this measure to reduce the burden on Internet servers.

While several users were complaining about not being able to post statuses longer than 15 seconds, WABetaInfo, a platform that usually puts out the latest developments of WhatsApp on the public domain, has tweeted about the latest development.

“You can no longer send videos to WhatsApp Status if they are longer than 16 seconds: only videos having a duration of 15 seconds will be allowed. This is happening in India and it's probably an initiative to reduce the traffic on the server infrastructures,” tweeted WABetaInfo.

While some users are still able to post longer videos, the move is expected to be rolled-out for more users over the next few days. WABetaInfo believes that this decision may have been taken as the Facebook-owned platform may have been receiving too many status updates from India.

WhatsApp recently announced that it has nearly 2 billion users worldwide, and India is a huge market for the platform. WhatsApp has 400 million users in India alone according to TechCrunch. Apart from WhatsApp, other platforms such as Netflix and YouTube too have taken measures to reduce the load on Internet servers during the lockdown period.