New Delhi: In what is being regarded as its largest global outage ever, messaging app WhatsApp has been unavailable since just after midday in India and other nations. At 2:15 PM, restoration got underway.
Popular online programme Down Detector first noticed an unusually high number of "trouble reports" at 12:07 PM and had thousands of them listed by 1 PM in India, WhatsApp's largest user base market. Messages not being sent accounted for 69% of reports, although additional issues included server disconnections and app crashes.
Italian and Turkish social media users both complained about not being able to send messages. According to the BBC, users in the UK could not access the messaging service, NDTV reported.
WhatsApp is used for payments and communication by over 2 billion users.
The business claimed that it is working to resume operations." 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," said a spokesperson of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram besides WhatsApp.
The hashtag #WhatsAppDown sparked a meme frenzy on Twitter and other social media sites. Many customers stated that at first, they believed the issue was with their internet service.
The actor Farhan Akhtar from the film Milkha Singh was depicted in another joke as "running to check on Twitter if WhatsApp is down."
It's the first significant outage for WhatsApp since last year.