In 2019, Will Cathcart took charge of WhatsApp with an easy-to-understand message, “This is the most used messaging app in the world and it is completely private, secure, and reliable.” It is only seven years since he took over but has decided to step down, saying that WhatsApp is now “in its strongest position ever before.” He is right about the figures as WhatsApp now counts more than three billion active users all over the world, with 853 million of those being from India. However, one thing is clear – strength and controversy do not go hand-in-hand. Here is why.
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Hardly any wounds that technology companies have self-inflicted in their history have been as spectacular as this one. On January 6, 2021, the company known as WhatsApp came up with a much-debated new policy which granted the company the right to use and distribute information about its users to its parent company – Facebook. The reaction came instantly.
During the weeks following the announcement, Signal became the top-grossing application with 17 million downloads within a week. WhatsApp was forced to push back its new deadline by three months (from February 8 to May 15) and tried to persuade users on social media – without success. This incident showed a profound lack of trust between WhatsApp and its two billion users; indeed, in India – where the company is widely used – it prompted an official warning from the Supreme Court concerning user privacy.
Cathcart’s tenure was off to a bad start right away thanks to the scandal involving the spyware. It involved taking advantage of the vulnerability called CVE-2019-3568 in WhatsApp’s VoIP stack which made it possible to install the spyware on a device without user interaction at all. The spyware was used to attack journalists, activists, lawyers and senior government officials in India.
WhatsApp sued the NSO Group which presented itself as the victim of the spyware – however, the public image of such an application as WhatsApp was not going to stand being portrayed as the victim of such a violation of the very principles it had been founded on. NSO Group was found guilty by a federal judge in 2024 and was required to pay Meta $4 million.
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Cathcart made his fiercest public attack on government policy during discussions around the UK Online Safety Bill, which sought to require backdoors into the encryption of messages. WhatsApp would pull out of the UK if this was required. Cathcart made his position clear: “We won’t reduce the security of WhatsApp. We’ve never done that—and we’ve been okay with WhatsApp being banned in other countries around the world.” WhatsApp joined forces on an open letter stating that the legislation would represent “an unprecedented threat to the privacy, safety and security of every UK citizen.”
The pressure paid off and the backdoor requirements were toned down, but the struggle highlighted the fragility of the encryption protection against the government’s wishes.
It may have been Cathcart’s darkest year not because of hacking or regulators but due to mob lynchings that swept across India in response to rumours of child abduction and organ harvesting spread virally over WhatsApp. It is believed that 24 individuals were murdered in 2018 in mob lynching attacks. In order to deal with the problem, WhatsApp implemented restrictions on forwarding messages, ran newspaper ads, and financed misinformation research. It was claimed that all these measures were mere patches applied to an underlying structure of a problem. Indeed, while WhatsApp encryption was the best feature of the platform, it was also what made it virtually immune to tracking down disinformation.
The last controversy associated with Cathcart’s tenure came at the very end of his time there. In 2026, WhatsApp started putting ads in its Updates tab, thus making its first serious move towards advertisements. For a company which had been promoting itself as the morally and ethically correct alternative to Facebook and Instagram for years, it was a clear change of course. People realized this, as did many critics who had always claimed that Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp was always going to be monetized eventually.
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