Analysts estimate WhatsApp's inactive accounts policy may have cost them almost 1.5 million users on a single ... Read More

CHENNAI: The internet blackout in Kashmir has resulted in yet another casualty as the state’s residents saw themselves losing access to their WhatsApp accounts on Wednesday as a result of the messaging app's policy on inactive accounts.

“To maintain security and limit data retention, WhatsApp accounts generally expire after 120 days of inactivity. When that happens, those accounts automatically exit all their WhatsApp groups. People will need to be re-added to groups upon regaining access to the internet and joining WhatsApp again," a spokesperson for the company told TOI.

The Facebook-owned company added that it wasn't a J&K-specific feature, but a policy for all WhatsApp accounts.

As J&K completed exactly four months of internet shutdown on December 4 (Wednesday), various residents of the Valley saw their WhatsApp accounts getting inactive and found themselves getting automatically exited from WhatsApp groups.

Two telecom analysts TOI spoke to said Jammu & Kashmir roughly holds around 1% of India’s total smartphone user base of around 490 million - making it a state with roughly 4.9 million smartphone users as of the time the blackout commenced in August.

“Given that it was users in the Valley region of the state who were hit by continued internet disruption for straight 120 days, it is safe to assume that roughly 1.5 million WhatsApp users may have got deactivated on a single day on Wednesday,” Faisal Kawoosa, founder of telecom consulting firm techARC, estimates.

While WhatsApp has around 400 million users in India, the company does not disclose region-wise split of this base.

The analysts estimate of impacted users factors in only residents of the Valley region (that has suffered continuous 120 days of outage) and also adjusts for around 35% of residents who would have been able to travel in and out of the region and thus keep their WhatsApp accounts active.

Originally hailing from J&K, Kawoosa witnessed first-hand all his friends and family members getting automatically exited from WhatsApp groups on Wednesday night.

“My school and family WhatsApp groups painted a very weird picture on Wednesday as suddenly at the same point I saw various members being reported as left,” he said.

People also took to social media to report on the unique phenomenon where they saw J&K members part of their WhatsApp groups leaving the group in one-shot.

“After 4 months of total communication blackout, @WhatsApp is automatically deleting Kashmiris from groups,” Shahnawaz B. Kaloo, a doctor based in Delhi, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night, posting a screenshot of one of his groups.

As reported by other observers with J&K-based WhatsApp contacts in their phone book, the people who were earlier showing up as WhatsApp contacts, were now being displayed as “Invite to WhatsApp.”

Khalid Shah, another Twitter user hailing from the region, wrote that it was “weird to see individuals you haven't spoken for all these months leave WhatsApp groups,” and their digital imprint also vanishing.

User data on WhatsApp, however, is backed up on Google Drive, and typically once users regain access to their accounts, they should be able to restore information from the Drive, as per last back up.

The government shut down mobile services and internet access in J&K from August 4, when it revoked the state’s special status.

Landline phones were functioning till the end of August, and the government subsequently also resumed postpaid mobile services recently.

The total active mobile subscriber base almost halved from July to September in the state, as per TRAI data.

