At midnight yesterday, WhatsApp suffered a global outage. The popular messaging app stopped working in many parts across the world, including India. It seems like the outage lasted for about an hour, from 12 AM to 1 AM. WhatsApp's parent company Facebook, however, did not face any such issue.
The good news is, WhatsApp is working just fine now. However, users were not too happy with the fact that the app stopped working at an important time. Many were trying to send New Year wishes to their friends and family, but failed to do so due to the outage. While users were able to send messages, they were not getting delivered to the recipients.
The messages showed only the single Gray tick, even though the internet connection of both the sender and the receiver was working fine. Some users reportedly even received a notification saying, "Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience."
It is worth mentioning here that WhatsApp has 1.3 billion monthly active users. In India alone, the number of smartphone users who utilize the service of this app adds up to more than 200 million monthly active users.
Twitteratis being Twitteratis, didn't leave the chance to make fun out of the situation. While a few reacted to the situation by posting funny memes, some users used the platform to express their anger. Hashtags like#WhatsAppisdown, #WhatsAppstoppedworking were trending on the micro-blogging site.
As per the information we have obtained, while WhatsApp was able to restore its services approx. 12:40 AM, it stopped working again. Reportedly, some server issue caused the outage. It was only post 1 AM, when the app were restored completely.
"WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience," said a WhatsApp spokesperson in a statement to Digital Trends.
This is not the first time WhatsApp has crashed. In the past few months, it has crashed several times. We hope the development team behind Facebook-owned messaging app finds out the reason for the latest soon enough and mitigates any such instances in the future.
