It took 11 years since Facebook acquired it for $19 billion, but Meta is finally bringing ads to WhatsApp, marking a major change for an app whose founders shunned advertising.
Meta announced Monday that businesses will now be able to run so-called status ads on WhatsApp that prompt users to interact with the advertisers via the app’s messaging features. The ads will only be shown to users within WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab to separate the promotions from people’s personal conversations. Additionally, Meta will begin monetizing WhatsApp’s Channels feature through search ads and subscriptions.
The debut of ads on the messaging app represents a significant step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s plans to make WhatsApp “the next chapter” in his company’s history, as he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in 2022. The move to monetize WhatsApp also comes amid Meta’s high-profile antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission over the company’s blockbuster acquisitions of the messaging app and Instagram.
Already, Meta allows advertisers to run so-called click-to-message ads on Facebook and Instagram that steer users to WhatsApp where they can directly engage with businesses. Messaging between brands and consumers “should be the next pillar of our business,” Zuckerberg told analysts in April, adding that WhatsApp now has over 3 billion monthly users, including “more than 100 million people in the U.S. and growing quickly there.”
Now, companies can run those kinds of ads within WhatsApp itself. The new status ads appear in a user’s Updates tab within that tab’s “Status” feature that can be used to share pictures, videos and text that vanish after 24 hours, akin to Instagram Stories.
Since Meta bought WhatsApp in 2014, the popular messaging app has continued to grow worldwide. But unlike Facebook, Instagram and most recently Threads, WhatsApp has never allowed advertising.
WhatsApp’s co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, were public in their scorn for the advertising industry, and the duo left Facebook after reportedly clashing with executives who were eager to inject the app with advertising and other practices they shunned.
The social media company does not reveal WhatsApp’s specific sales, but analysts have previously estimated the app’s revenue to be between $500 million and $1 billion from charging businesses for tools and services so they can message customers on the app.
Meta will “use very basic information” to recommend which ads to show WhatsApp users, Nikila Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, said Friday. This includes a person’s country, city, device, language and data like who they follow or how they interact with ads.
The company debuted WhatsApp’s Updates tab in June2023 along with an accompanying Channels feature that allows people and organizations to send broadcast messages and updates to their followers as opposed to personal conversations. Meta will also monetize the Channels feature, the company said Monday.
Organizations and people who are Channel administrators will now be able to spend money to boost the visibility of their respective Channels when a person searches for them via a directory, similar to ads on Apple’s and Google’s app stores.
Additionally, channel administrators will be able to charge users monthly subscription fees to access exclusive updates and content, Meta said Monday. The company will not immediately make money from those monthly subscription fees, but it plans to eventually take a 10% cut of those subscriptions, a spokesperson said.
Meta hopes that by limiting its new ads to WhatsApp’s Updates tab it will disrupt users as little as possible, Srinivasan said. Users’ status updates as well as personal messages and calls on WhatsApp will remain encrypted, she said.
“We really believe that the Updates tab is the right place for these new features,” Srinivasan said.
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Read more CNBC tech news
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”