WhatsApp’s services were reinstated on Tuesday after an over two-hour long outage that affected both individual and business customers. For thousands of users, both in India and all across the world, the instant messaging network was down, making it impossible for them to send or receive messages or view updates to their status updates.
The cause of the interruption was not made public by the company. While the app was down, fewer major issues affected other online services, such as Instagram and Facebook Messenger, which are sibling platforms.
WhatsApp has developed into a vital tool for communication in both homes and workplaces. Trading of assets, including cryptocurrency and oil, was affected by WhatsApp’s hours-long outage in October before traders resorted to alternate platforms like Telegram.
A two-hour outage is big for Meta, but it is brief in comparison to the company’s five-hour issue from a year ago. At the time, Facebook’s network engineers made a configuration error that effectively informed the whole internet that the service’s servers were offline. The internet’s dispersed systems required many hours to completely filter out the update, even though it was quickly reversed.
The outage likely caused serious disruption. The software is a well-liked tool for group communication for social, professional, and parental tasks because it provides end-to-end encryption for messages. Even contentious government ministers have used it. Users in the UK and around the world were impacted by the outage, according to internet monitoring company NetBlocks. Australian and Ukrainian users are also having trouble using the service.
Even though WhatsApp outages are still relatively infrequent, they have a significant impact on global communications because more than two billion people use the app each month.