WhatsApp outage: Why were services down?

After being down for nearly two and a half hours, Meta’s instant messaging service WhatsApp is back up. For the most part, the app has regained functionality even as some users complained about glitches. Individual and group chats were impacted, as well as WhatsApp Web. 

“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 Meta spokesperson said about the outage. 

The outage did not just impact users in India. Users across the globe reported trouble with WhatsApp. Users from Spain, Indonesia, Kenya, Germany, South Africa and even more nations reported the outage. 

As of now, Meta hasn’t released any information about why the outage occurred. However, this isn’t the first time that the company has had issues with keeping its services online. 

In October 2021, all of Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger went down for over six hours. The issue was revealed by Meta to be an “internal mechanical issue”. In March that very year WhatsApp went down for 45 minutes but Meta didn’t provide any information about why it happened. 

In 2020, WhatsApp went down for a total of four times, the most major of which lasted for three hours. There was one in April that year, followed by a two-hour disruption in July and another one in August. The most major one was in 2019 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for 14 hours. 

However, the reason for the increasingly frequent outages might be attributed to the growing number of users on all of these platforms. As a result, when product changes or updates need to be rolled out, they need to be done in a segmented way. In addition, with the massive number of people using its services, Meta might also be contracting third-parties to maintain its services.