Many countries including Pakistan and India faced a brief outage of the meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp on Tuesday. WhatsApp is by far the most popular messaging platform in Pakistan. Whatsapp Outage, however, was restored after a disruption that lasted for nearly two hours. Initial reports had suggested users couldn’t send or receive messages on the Meta-owned messaging platform, with #WhatsApp quickly turning into a top trend on Twitter.
After the restoration, Whatsapp gave an official statement;
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.”
The company did not issue any cause of the outage and was silent on that matter. US tech giant Meta had then confirmed a global outage had affected its messaging service WhatsApp and said it was working to restore the service “as quickly as possible”.
The outage was reported after the tracking website Downdetector shared that users were experiencing problems using the service. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, said the problem had been fixed but did not give a reason for the disruption. People trying to send and receive messages on WhatsApp, which has about two billion users globally, began reporting issues just before 08:00 BST(12:00 PST). More than 12,000 reports were posted within half an hour, according to the service status website Down Detector. However, by about 10:00 BST(14:00 PST) service seemed to be returning for many users. As WhatsApp experienced difficulties many people complained on social media that they could not send or receive messages.
Users who tried to use the app on Tuesday morning were faced with a “connecting” message. The outage is likely to have caused significant disruption. The app, which offers end-to-end encryption for messages, is a popular method of group communication for social, work, and parenting activities.
Watsapp Outage has even been used, controversially, by government ministers. According to internet monitoring organization NetBlocks, the outage affected users both in the UK and around the world. There were also reports of issues in Hong Kong, South Africa, Singapore, and India – a key market for the platform.
