Could Facebook's New App Already Have a Formidable Competitor?

By Daniel Sparks – Mar 2, 2014 at 10:00AM

NASDAQ: META

Meta Platforms

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During an outage of Facebook's new app last week, users flocked to another messaging service.

Facebook (META 0.14%) recently announced a deal valued at $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp -- a multi-platform messaging service. Nineteen billion dollars is a big sum to pay for any company, but especially for one that already has a potentially formidable competitor.

Last week, WhatsApp experienced the longest outage in its history. During the four hours the service was down, users scrambled to download a new messaging app. The event triggered nearly 5 million downloads of an app called Telegram in the short period WhatsApp was down. Further, the app shot up to the top free download in Apple's App Store charts in 46 countries.

With an app that basically looks like a clone of WhatsApp so capable of serving as an alternative to Facebook's new subsidiary, did Facebook overpay?

In the following video, Fool contributor Daniel Sparks takes a closer look at WhatsApp's rising competition.

Daniel Sparks owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Apple and Facebook. We Fools don't all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.