Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp came back online after nearly two hours of disruption although some users have reported being unable to send or receive messages. The service was hit across devices including on WhatsApp web.

The Android and iOS apps are back up and running for many users as Meta rolled out a fix for what is being called one of the service’s longest-ever outages. 

Shortly after reports of the outage intensified, a Meta spokesperson released a statement which said, “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.”

Early in October last year, Facebook faced a similar outage, except it last six hours and affected its Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp services as well. Over the course of six hours, the company worked on fixing the outage which it later revealed to have been an “internal technical issue.” 

Even as users were concerned about the security of their data, Facebook revealed at the time that there was “no evidence that user data was compromised”, according to a BBC report. 

Such outages are usually pretty rare. However, last year’s outage was far from the longest one. In 2019, the same apps went down, but this time for 14 hours. At the time, Facebook alone had 2.3 billion monthly users.

Prior to the 2019 outage, Facebook encountered a bug which knocked it offline for 24 hours in 2008. However, the platform wasn’t as pervasive as it is now so the fallout was, in some sense, not as bad. 

However, these days WhatsApp is an integral part of many markets globally. Cryptocurrency and oil trading in some parts of the world are done via WhatsApp. When the messaging service went down for six hours last year, many switched to Telegram to continue working.