Popular messaging app WhatsApp stopped working for many users across the world on Tuesday, with users in India and abroad reporting issues sending and receiving texts and videos. The service slowly came back online after around an hour.
Users took to Twitter to trend #WhatsAppDown with jokes on briefly migrating to similar platforms like Signal and Telegram. #WhatsAppDown was trending on Twitter, with more than 70,000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet. The outage seemed to affect the Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp on both its app and web versions.
According to outage reporting site Downdetector, issues with WhatsApp began to be flagged at 12:18pm on Tuesday and reports touched 27,000 at 1pm. Downdetector showed over 68,000 users had reported problems with the app in the United Kingdom. Problems were also reported by 19,000 people in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa, it said.
The app has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses, and regularly issues updates without which users may sometimes be unable to use the service. But that did not seem to be the case on Tuesday as the outage was widely reported across continents and countries.
The app’s latest outage comes during the festive season of Diwali in India — its biggest market by user count — when people use the platform even more than usual to send season’s greetings.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms said on Tuesday.
WhatsApp had suffered a similar hours-long outage last October along with other Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The six-hour outage had hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to oil, before traders switched to alternative platforms such as Signal and Telegram.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov had then stated that his instant messaging app added a whopping 70 million users during the Meta outage and said that it was a record increase in user registration and activity for the service.
Users had also reported similar issues in April. At that time, the company put out a statement saying: “You may be experiencing some issues using WhatsApp at the moment. We’re aware and working to get things running smoothly again. We’ll keep you updated and in the meantime, thanks for your patience.”
The 2021 Outage
WhatsApp’s nearly six-hour long outage on October 5, 2021 had hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to Russian oil. Facebook Inc had then blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
But the company had not specified who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned. Reuters had quoted several Facebook employees, who declined to be named, that they believed the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.
The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same network in order to work compounded the error, the employees had reportedly said. Security experts had said an inadvertent mistake or sabotage by an insider were both plausible.
Despite many financial institutions discouraging employees from using messaging services such as WhatsApp and other Facebook platforms, their convenience has made them popular among traders communicating with clients in over-the-counter (OTC) markets.
WhatsApp usage among financial traders tracked by communications surveillance firm VoxSmart has boomed as banks accept that clients want to use the platform, even if bosses prefer their staff to use official messaging channels, VoxSmart CEO Oliver Blower had said.
The app has become the “default messaging service” in many markets, especially in continental Europe and Asia-Pacific, Blower added.
From some 2,000 interdealer users sending 10,000 messages a day in the energy market in 2016, VoxSmart today tracks between three and five million messages weekly across asset classes, including between banks and buy-side clients.
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