There are many changes happening around the world thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. People are kept indoors and one of the activities this has resulted in is increasing time spent on social media sites. Facebook has found that the messaging and calling on the WhatsApp platform has spiked and the company is now resorting to placing limits on certain usages. The messaging platform has now imposed a limit of 15 seconds for videos shared as status updates. Interestingly, this is being done only for the Indian users of WhatsApp, it is learnt. The company feels too many people uploading lengthy videos is slowing the whole system down.
The feature has already been rolled out according to WABeataInfo. This change means that WhatsApp has halved the video runtime from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. Some sections had reported it as 16 seconds it appears; that stands corrected. If users have longer videos, they will now have to crop it and reduce it to 15 seconds or less. This may be a temporary measure and can be restored to the earlier 30 seconds once things return to normalcy later.
It must be noted that this is not an official announcement from WhatsApp or Facebook directly, but by someone who has seen it practically on his or her iPhone. If the feature is there on the iOS devices, it must surely be on the Android devices as well.
The process of uploading the Status video is the same, you tap on Status on the main WhatsApp page and then record a video or click a photo and then choose the Send button to change the Status. You have the option to select the image or video from your phone’s gallery as well. The only change now is if it is a video, it cannot be more than 15 seconds.