Popular Messaging platform WhatsApp Tuesday afternoon resumed working normally after an outage of about two hours, its longest ever since last year in October.
At about 10:20 am on Tuesday, WhatsApp stopped working for millions of users in Uganda and globally at and restoration began by around 12 pm (EAT), though users reported that it was not stable upon return. The glitches went away gradually.
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” said a spokesperson of Meta, which owns WhatsApp, besides Facebook and Instagram whereas he did not pinpoint the reason.
A popular online tool Down Detector started noticing unusually high “problem reports” at 10.07 am and had listed more than 25,000 such reports by 12 pm.
Nearly 70 per cent of the reports were about messages not going through, while others were about server disconnection and the app crashing altogether. These reports came down to about 1,000 by 1 pm.
Today’s outage was the first such global outage since last year. On October 5, 2021, all three Meta outlets were down for up to six hours.
Over 2 billion users rely on WhatsApp for communication and payments. The company was quick to issue a statement that it was working on bringing it back up.
A meme fest with the hashtag #WhatsAppDown began on Twitter and other platforms. Many users said they first thought their internet service was the problem.
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