Bad News for WhatsApp Videos Share – NO longer than 15 seconds as status in India

Facebook-owned WhatsApp poular social networking application have the Status feature for since few years now, which permits the users to post status videos that volatile after 24 hours. Now It appears that messaging services is now limiting status video uploads as to just 15 seconds in India. This is likely due to the pandemic COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown in the country that is causing a network congestion. By reducing the WhatsApp Status video limit to 15 seconds, it could ease upload on WhatsApp servers that will make the WhatsApp server easy to supply data nodes to every user around the globe. Other internet entertainment platforms like Netflix, YouTube and others have also reduced the bit-rate and resolution on their platforms to deal with the network congestion. The 15-second WhatsApp Status video limit has not been officially announced, but it is already being noted by many users in India.

This restriction in the time limit for putting out a WhatsApp Status has been placed only in India. The reason is to reduce the load on the server since a lot of people have started sharing videos. We also tried to post a WhatsApp Status beyond 15 seconds and found that it could not be done. This happens to be a server-side change that is being rolled out tremendously to users who are on the stable version of WhatsApp and beta users should also see the changes soon. The move appears to be temporary as of now and its hoping to be reverted back to normal once the lockdown period gets ended i.e after April 14th as announced by the PM of India.

Services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Hotstar and more have already reduced the quality of default streaming from HD (720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K) to SD (480p). Some of these platforms allow you to manually change the resolution to HD, while others like YouTube have limited max video quality to 480p on Android and iOS.