The world's biggest messaging service WhatsApp, which Facebook has just bought for $19 billion, will add voice calls to its product in the second quarter of this year, its chief executive Jan Koum said on Monday.
With 450 million users worldwide, WhatsApp and its competitors South Korea's KakaoTalk and China's WeChat have punched a hole in telecom operators' revenue in recent years by offering a free alternative to text messaging.
The news that the most powerful of them was adding voice calls to its service will likely be seen as worrying for telecom operators globally, which got about $120 billion from text messaging last year, according to market researcher Ovum.
"We are driven by the mission that people should be able to stay in touch anywhere and affordably. Our goal is to be on every mobile phone in the world," Koum said on Monday, speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Koum said WhatsApp's acquisition by Facebook would not alter his roadmap to develop the product to reach the next 1 billion users. No advertising will added to the service, he said.
Facebook's Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was also slated to speak at 5pm GMT.
WhatsApp's Koum also sought to cast himself as a partner to telecom operators and not simply a competitor. He announced a partnership with KPN's E-Plus under which it will launch a WhatsApp branded mobile service in Germany.
"We are working with carriers in established markets to bring value to end users," he said.
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WhatsApp's 450 million worldwide users were unable to access the smartphone free-messaging service on Saturday, three days after Facebook declared it was lavishing up to $19 billion on it.
"Sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly,"WhatsApp said in a message on Twitter that was retweeted more than 25,000 times in just a few hours and provoked ridicule because it comes so soon after Facebook's hefty acquisition.
Some WhatsApp users found they were unable to connect to the app, while others complained their messages were not going through.
WhatsApp has not indicated how long the outage would last or when it began.
However, the specialist website techcrunch.com suggested the problem might be down to "a surge of signups and usage that has overloaded its servers" after the publicity the app garnered after Facebook's announcement on Wednesday.
Facebook is betting huge on mobile with the eye-popping cash-and-stock deal for WhatsApp, which was only started five years ago but has quickly grown as a free alternative to text messages.
It is Facebook's biggest acquisition and comes less than two years after the California-based Internet star raised $16 billion in the richest tech sector public stock offering.
Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook were immediately available for comment. However, the outage was the source of much amusement -- as well as anger -- on Twitter.
"I expect you are all away from your desks on the ales drinking some of that Facebook cash!" one user, "leonclarance," replied to WhatsApp's tweet about the blackout.
Another simply tweeted: "Turn down Facebook's offer guys!"
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