WhatsApp users report global outage impacting photos, videos, and media sharing

New Delhi: Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp suffered a widespread global disruption on Monday, leaving users across multiple countries unable to send or receive photos, videos, stickers, GIFs, and other media files.

Outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded a sharp surge in user reports beginning early Monday morning. Among the reported issues, 41% pertained to messaging errors, 40% involved overall app functionality, and 13% related to push notifications.

While standard text messaging remained functional for most users, multimedia uploads either stalled indefinitely or experienced severe latency. Affected users reported seeing endless loading spinners, failed upload indicators, and persistent "retry" prompts when attempting to share images and videos in chats. Larger file transfers failed entirely for many.

The service disruption was reported across several major international markets, including India, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain, and Colombia, indicating a broader server-side or infrastructure issue rather than a localized network failure.

Standard troubleshooting attempts—such as toggling between Wi-Fi and mobile data, rebooting devices, or reinstalling the application—proved ineffective in resolving the media upload errors.

The incident follows a smaller spike in service disruption reports registered on Sunday. Meta and WhatsApp have not yet released an official statement regarding the cause or estimated resolution time for the outage.

(Inputs from IANS)