WhatsApp Channels Become Available Worldwide

Today, we're excited to launch WhatsApp Channels in over 150 countries, giving you a way to get the updates you care about without compromising your privacy. We say hello to thousands of organizations, sports teams, artists and thought leaders that people can follow directly on WhatsApp.

If you are not familiar with the channels, let us explain briefly: Our goal is to develop a broadcast service where privacy is at the forefront. Channels are separate from your chats. Other followers cannot see who you follow. We also protect the personal information of both administrators and followers.

We received a lot of positive feedback during the launch process in ten countries. As we roll out channels globally, we're also making the following updates:

Improved Directory - You can now find channels you can follow, automatically filtered by your country. You can also see the newest, most active and most popular channels by number of followers.

Emoticons - Using emoticons you can react and see the total number of emoticons. The emoticons you leave will not be shown to your followers.

Edit - Soon admins will have the ability to make changes to their Updates for 30 days. At the end of this period, we will automatically delete the Updates from our servers.

Forward - When you forward an Update to a chat or group, your post will include a link to the channel so people can get more information.

We're just getting started and will continue to add more features and improve Channels based on feedback we get from users. In the coming months, we will allow anyone who wants to create a channel.

We would also like to point out that if you would like to receive information directly from us about new product updates, we have opened the official WhatsApp Channel where you can be informed about our work.