Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp is reportedly facing partial disruption. Users have reported being unable to send or receive messages on the platform. The service has been down for the last 30 minutes, according to an ANI report.
Predictably, Twitter is having a field day as memes take over people’s feeds.
Reports of the outage began around 12:00 pm IST on Downdetector with a large mass of outage reports accumulating around 12:51 pm. The outage wasn’t isolated to just India but was seen globally, with reports of WhatsApp being down coming in from users in Germany, the United States, South Africa, Bahrain, Bangladesh and more.
Shortly after memes about WhatsApp being down went viral on Twitter, the company issued a statement about the matter.
“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.
Across the world, the messaging service has become of critical importance to markets and even individuals as they do business through it. In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the F8 developers conference showed that Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined accounted for 60 billion messages sent daily between users.
In fact, last year Facebook services including Instagram and WhatsApp went down for six hours. The outage hit some markets, like cryptocurrencies and oil hard as trades came to a grinding halt, but quickly recovered as people moved their business to other platforms like Telegram.
When Facebook brought its services back online, it attributed the outage to an internal technical issue. The company’s vice-president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan had said at the time that the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
