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Clarify requirements before you design — kept separate from your stage notes.

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WhatsApp System Design

Visual Problem Diagram

WhatsApp System Design architecture diagram

Scenario

Imagine billions of people treating chat like a utility—one tap to send, one glance at delivery ticks, and trust that no one at the company can read the thread. Within seconds of a viral moment, a family group shares a video, a stadium channel floods with reactions, and millions of phones retry the same send on bad train Wi‑Fi. Designing messaging that stays private, ordered, and instant under that pressure is a classic large-scale system design challenge.

Design a messaging platform like WhatsApp with one-on-one and group chat, delivery and read receipts, and end-to-end encryption. Real production systems separate small control messages (text, receipts, presence) from large media files (photos, video). Mobile networks retry—your design must handle duplicate sends and still show messages in the right order.

Constraints

Constraints will be defined in the Requirements stage.

Stages ahead

1Requirement Analysis
2API Design
3High-Level Design
4HLD Extensions
5Trade-offs

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WhatsApp System Design (Messaging Reliability at Scale)