International mobile messenger WhatsApp was coming back online on Tuesday, with the company’s parent Meta Platforms Inc. announcing it has resolved the issue that resulted in an outage and temporarily kept users worldwide from accessing the platform for two hours.
A monitoring service site reported earlier in the day that more than 68,000 users were having trouble accessing WhatsApp in the UK. The same problem was also encountered by 19,000 and 15,000 users in Singapore and South Africa, respectively.
A spokesperson for Meta later said it had fixed the issue and apologized for the disruption.
The company, however, did not reveal the cause of the app’s brief shutdown. It has also not provided updates as users in Asia, India, and the UK started regaining access to the platform.
Other Platforms’ Reaction to WhatsApp’s Outage
WhatsApp’s recent outage came at a time of festivity in India, its largest market in terms of user base, when it has more people accessing its platform to send season’s greetings.
The app, which has two billion monthly active users globally, is widely known for providing means of group communication for social, work, and parenting activities.
WhatsApp experienced such a technical issue before. Last year, the instant messaging platform was offline for about six hours, which also affected Facebook, Oculus, and Instagram.
Meta later said the problem was due to a configuration update.
While WhatsApp’s past outage has coincided with an issue on Facebook and Instagram, its recent shutdown seemed to have no impact on the two social media platforms. Twitter, where the #whatsappdown became a trending topic, was also unaffected.
Rival apps such as Telegram, Snap Inc., and even Instagram have, in the past, observed more user activity while WhatsApp was down.
Having a massive user base worldwide, WhatsApp has become a critical means of communication in many countries. However, Telegram appears to be trying to compete, steadily growing its user base over the last few years to amass over 700 million monthly active users.
