WhatsApp, the messaging app, was beginning to come back up, and the firm stated that the problem had been resolved after users from around the globe reported issues earlier on Tuesday.
At approximately 07:50 GMT, Downdetector claimed that over 68,000 users in the United Kingdom had reported problems with the app. Additionally, 19,000 users in Singapore and 15,000 users in South Africa reported issues.
“We’re aware that people had problems sending WhatsApp messages today. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta Platforms, has resolved the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience.
The corporation provided no explanation for the outage. During the app’s outage, other online services, including Instagram and Facebook Messenger, were affected by fewer severe issues.
WhatsApp has become an indispensable tool for family and commercial communication. In October of 2017, a WhatsApp outage lasting several hours disrupted the trading of assets ranging from cryptocurrency to crude oil, before traders shifted to alternative platforms such as Telegram.
This underscores the significance of large hosting providers routing data over the Internet, as well as businesses and individuals relying on single points of communication, according to Jake Moore, a consultant at the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET.
“Multiple locations will surely be considerably disrupted as a result of this outage, as well as an expected financial blow, but lessons from past recent prominent occasions when the internet went down will hopefully have taught many to have access to alternative modes of communication,” he said.
A two-hour delay is substantial for Meta, but it is shorter than the five-hour disruption the company had a year ago. That time, the issue was created by a configuration error pushed by Facebook’s network engineers, which informed the internet that the service no longer had any live servers.
Read More: THE HISTORY OF DIWALI, THE FIVE-DAY LIGHT CELEBRATION
Although the update was quickly rolled back, it took many hours for the information to fully trickle through the scattered systems that comprise the internet.
The most recent WhatsApp outage occurred during the holiday season in India, its largest market by user count, when more people than normal use the platform to send holiday greetings. Some joked that the volume of messages sent during Diwali may have contributed to the outage.
In the past, the size of the Indian market has caused problems for the app: the widespread practice of sending “good morning” images to friends and family members, as well as holiday greetings, caused service interruptions until the company introduced a “status” feature that allowed users to share messages with all their followers at once.
Following the interruption, Meta shares declined 0.7% to $128.85 in pre-market trading. As consumers in Asia, India, and the United Kingdom began to see some connections return online, the corporation had not given any new updates.
The hashtag #whatsappdown was trending on Twitter, with over 142 thousand posts and hundreds of memes flooding the web.
When WhatsApp has been unavailable in the past, competing apps such as Telegram, Snap, and Meta’s Instagram have experienced temporary increases in user numbers.
While WhatsApp claims over 2 billion monthly active users and has become the communications standard in most countries, Telegram has assumed the position of rival with over 700 million members.
