Gen Z’s favorite social app, BeReal, suffered a lengthy outage today, and the company only admitted it in brief and rather vague terms tweet,illustrate: “Yes, we are working on it.” In recent months, the Paris-based app maker has seen its photo-sharing service climb to the top of the App Store, sometimes knocking rivals like Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok out of the top spot. But the company also has a reputation for a lack of communication — a pattern that seems to extend to its own users.
So far, the startup has not officially offered official interviews to the media, although it has offered to meet some for informal briefings. (or apparently, if you are Financial Times.)
However, this hesitancy about communication goes beyond the media. Today, as BeReal faces a lengthy outage — lasting hours and frustrating users who can’t upload photos — the company has nothing to say.
Meanwhile, loyal users flooded the account’s Twitter replies, demanding more information, while others posted their complaints on the hashtag #BeRealDown. Many people just wondered if the problems they had with the app affected others as well. They don’t have any information.
BeReal declined to answer some questions about its outage, including the cause of the outage, the extent of its impact and whether the company knows when it will be resolved.
Understandably, its team may have been grappling with technical issues before responding to these inquiries.But when the outage was resolved after a few hours, we were only pointed out this tweet It read: “Everything is fine now.”
A company’s lack of transparency, while pushing its millions of user bases to be “real” to each other, is starting to get weaker.
At this point, we have to wonder how companies like this would respond if there were more serious issues affecting their platforms. What if BeReal suffers a data breach or hack? If bad actors interact with the platform in some way – will BeReal have anything to say?
The company can’t keep pretending it’s a small independent app maker.it is Raised $30 million in Series A fundingled by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, followed by DST Global’s B-SeriesFocus on startups, upfront funding $600+ million, the report said.The app has According to Sensor Tower, there are nearly 46 million installs. It’s still the third-largest app on the U.S. iPhone App Store non-gaming chart today — it only temporarily lost the top spot as a widget-creation app after the launch of iOS 16. It soon plans to monetize subscriptions.
While avoiding the media may be a tactic BeReal currently employs, not communicating with its own users seems like a misstep. BeReal has been on the rise, but it can’t count on its continued success just yet.
After all, young people are nothing if not fickle when it comes to trying and letting go of new social experiences. TikTok completely cloned the entire BeReal format in a way, as did Instagram and Snapchat. If BeReal wants to be seen as a company and not just a feature to replicate, it’s time for it to act like a company.
