WhatsApp has chosen Erlang a language built for writing scalable applications that are designed to withstand errors. Erlang uses an abstraction called the Actor model for it's concurrency . Instead of the more traditional shared memory approach, actors communicate by sending each other messages. Actors unlike threads are designed to be lightweight. Actors could be on the same machine or on different machines and the message passing abstractions works for both. A simple implementation of WhatsApp could be: Each user/device is represented as an actor. This actor is responsible for handling the inbox of the user, how it gets serialized to disk, the messages that the user sends and the messages that the user receives. Let's assume that Alice and Bob are friends on WhatsApp. So there is an an Alice actor and a Bob actor.
Let's trace a series of messages flowing back and forth:
Alice decides to message Bob. Alice's phone establishes a connection to the WhatsApp server and it is established that this connection is definitely from Alice's phone. Alice now sends via TCP the following message: "For Bob: A giant monster is attacking the Golden Gate Bridge". One of the WhatsApp front end server deserializes this message and delivers this message to the actor called Alice.
Alice the actor decides to serialize this and store it in a file called "Alice's Sent Messages", stored on a replicated file system to prevent data loss due to unpredictable monster rampage. Alice the actor then decides to forward this message to Bob the actor by passing it a message "Msg1 from Alice: A giant monster is attacking the Golden Gate Bridge". Alice the actor can retry with exponential back-off till Bob the actor acknowledges receiving the message.
Bob the actor eventually receives the message from (2) and decides to store this message in a file called "Bob's Inbox". Once it has stored this message durably Bob the actor will acknowledge receiving the message by sending Alice the actor a message of it's own saying "I received Msg1". Alice the actor can now stop it's retry efforts. Bob the actor then checks to see if Bob's phone has an active connection to the server. It does and so Bob the actor streams this message to the device via TCP.
Bob sees this message and replies with "For Alice: Let's create giant robots to fight them". This is now received by Bob the actor as outlined in Step 1. Bob the actor then repeats Step 2 and 3 to make sure Alice eventually receives the idea that will save mankind.
WhatsApp actually uses the XMPP protocol instead of the vastly superior protocol that I outlined above, but you get the point.
