Design a group chat system

Q: Design a group chat system

This is a System Design interview question from Airbnb for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

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System Design: Group Chat

Design a scalable group chat system (like a basic Slack/WhatsApp group chat).

Core features

Users can create groups, join/leave groups, and manage membership.
Users can send messages to a group and receive messages on multiple devices.
Store message history and allow fetching recent messages.

Non-functional requirements

Low latency message delivery.
High availability and horizontal scalability.
Reasonable ordering guarantees within a group.

Explain:

APIs
Data model / storage
Real-time delivery mechanism
How you scale (sharding/partitioning)
How you handle offline users and multi-device sync
Tradeoffs (fanout, ordering, consistency)

Design a group chat system

System Design: Group Chat

Core features

Non-functional requirements

Solution

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