Whatsapp News: Messaging App Experiences Outage Worldwide
Whatsapp users from various countries around the world had difficulty using the messaging application due to an outage on Friday.
The outage was first spotted by Reuters when the media outlet observed that the hashtag "whatsappdown" had been trending on social media platforms.
According to the report, users from countries like Brazil, Russia, India, Pakistan, Britain, and Germany joined online discussions and confirmed that they were experiencing difficulties in accessing the app's services.
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The supposed system outage for Whatsapp lasted for almost an hour and was also felt in some parts of Asia, such as in Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. A representative for the Facebook-owned messaging app said at the time that they were still investigating what caused the problem, Reuters reported.
According to the website downdetector.com, Whatsapp users reported facing issues in using the application mostly on Friday where the site gathered more than 7,800 reports. Fifty-three percent of those reports were from users who had problems with sending or receiving messages, 42 percent of them had difficulty with their connections, and the remaining 3 percent were unable to log in.
Downdetector recorded another wave of reports on the same day, but a bigger fraction of users complained about not being able to log in to their Whatsapp accounts. It is important to note, though, that these numbers were based on the reports received by the website and did not represent the entire scope of Whatsapp outages around the world.
Following the reports, a spokesperson for Whatsapp told media: "Earlier today, WhatsApp users globally had trouble accessing the app for about an hour. This issue has been fixed and we apologize for the inconvenience." Sky News added that the company denied that the outage was a result of a cyberattack.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported that the outage was most likely caused by a software code bug and not by a problematic data center.
This was the second major outage Whatsapp users experienced this year following an incident in May that lasted for a couple of hours, longer than what happened on Friday.
