WhatsApp New Year's Eve Outages Latest News: Messaging Service Offers Apology
Some WhatsApp users missed the chance to send their New Year's Eve greetings this year using the service. The company behind the messaging app, which is used by 1.3 billion users monthly, has admitted to have experienced "a brief outage."
"WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience," a WhatsApp representative said via an email to VentureBeat.
The messaging service platform has not yet offered details on the cause of the interruption.
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Thousands of users reported that Whatsapp went down on Sunday, just as New Year's Eve celebrations neared their peak on 1 p.m. EST, according to the Independent.
The website DownDetector, which aggregates reports from users about outages, found that parts of England, Germany, and the whole of Netherlands were the worst-hit by the outage.
Parts of Italy, Spain and Central Europe were hit as well. Reports were starting to come in as early as 12 noon EST, although a report from WhatsApp mentioned that they took note of the outages at 1:30 p.m. EST.
The outages affected other major cities and countries as well, including Rio de Jeniro, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Mumbai and Toronto.
The outage seems to have lasted for almost two hours, as users began to note that their messages were not getting through — all the app was showing was a loading wheel that did not go away. The bulk of the reports were such that DownDetector got around 2,000 reports, although the number dropped by 2 p.m. EST.
At the time the outage was at its peak, users in India and Sri Lanka were in the middle of greeting the year 2018.
It's not a new occurrence, though. WhatsApp seems to get hit with outages about once a month, lasting for as long as a few hours. Outages like these are resolved quickly enough in most cases, as the Independent notes.
