ISLAMABAD: US tech giant Meta said Tuesday it had fixed a global outage affecting its messaging service WhatsApp after users around the world, including Pakistan, complained that they were unable to send or receive messages, confirmed a spokesperson for the company.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms told to media.
The outage was reported after the tracking website Downdetector shared that users were experiencing problems using the service. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may have affected a larger number of users.
At around 12:50 pm PST, Downdetector showed over 3,300 users had reported problems with the app in Pakistan, 68,000 in the United Kingdom, 19,000 in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa.
The hashtag #whatsappdown was one of the most trending on Twitter across the world, while millions of messages on the Meta-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram also flagged the outage.
ORIGIN OF OUTAGE WAS UNCLEAR
Meta, previously known as Facebook, bought WhatsApp in 2014. The service is wildly popular especially outside of the US, where many people use it for everyday communication.
The tech company suffered an unprecedented outage last year affecting its leading social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
The duration and scale of the disruption to the four services used by billions of people led to a major incident that Downdetector described as one of the largest ever observed.
At the time, Facebook acknowledged that the incident was due to an error on its part and not a technical problem.
