Meta’s prized messaging platform, WhatsApp has gone down affecting thousands of users so far.

The outage has lasted for roughly 40 minutes up till now with a Meta spokesperson already releasing a statement saying, ” 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.”

Predictably, Twitter is having a field day with it as memes and jokes have made it to the social media platform’s Trending page, taking up the top spot with #whatsappdown.

We don’t know how long the outage is going to last this time but last year, it wasn’t just WhatsApp that went down but all of Meta’s services, including Facebook. 

Also Read | WhatsApp outage: Social media floods with memes

The outage lasted for six embarrassing hours as the company scrambled to brings its services back online. It wasn’t just users who were affected by what had happened, but also Facebook’s employees. They were unable to send or receive emails nor were they able to access their buildings and conference rooms, according to a report from The Verge. 

The company blamed the sudden service disruption on an internal technical issue. Later, Facebook’s vice-president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said that the outage had been caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.” In simpler terms, it is likely that an unsuspecting Facebook employee made an error that made it impossible for the rest of the Internet to connect with Facebook services.

Eventually, Facebook’s team managed to gain access to a server computer in a data center in Santa Monica, California and reset services. Six hours after the outage began, Facebook services were more or less restored. 

During the outage, several other tech services like Gmail, TikTok and Snapchat experienced a slowdown. At the time, the outage was being called the worst outage since 2008. As for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the tech behemoth saw his wealth fall by roughly $6 billion as share prices dropped by 5%. Similarly, the company lost out on $60 million in ad revenue during the outage.