The instant messaging app WhatsApp is restored after a two-hour-long outage on Tuesday. WhatsApp, with around a billion active users, was alerted about the global outage when hundreds of thousands of its online users reported the disruption in their messaging app.
Reportedly, the instant messaging platform went down at 12:30 PM IST, on Tuesday. The users reported they were unable to send messages or make calls through the app, which was earlier thought of as a mere network connectivity issue.
The outage was not limited to the smartphone users of the app, since users of WhatsApp web were also facing the same consequences of the disruption.
As per a report by Downdetector, an online platform providing real-time stats and information regarding online web services, more than 11,000 online users had reported the outage, while in the United Kingdom the count was 68,000. While in Singapore, about 19,000 users reported disruption in the app since 07:50 GMT.
Downdetector gathers status updates from various sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, to keep track of outages. There may have been many users who were impacted by the outage.
Additionally, WaBetaInfo, an online portal tracking WhatsApp services claimed that the issue is indeed from the server’s side and thus cannot be resolved from the online user’s end.
Soon after acknowledging the issue, WhatsApp’s parent company Meta said that their engineers are working on the outage issue and will solve it as soon as possible. Following this, Meta Spokesperson even apologized to the users for the inconvenience.
“We are aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we are working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” says Meta Company Spokesperson. While the reason behind the outage is still not revealed by the parent company.
Considering the popularity of the messaging app which has increasingly emerged as an important communication tool between users, businesses, and governments globally, over 100 billion messages are exchanged daily through WhatsApp as of 2020. This recent outage may have affected a large number of users, including government officials and telecom service providers.
