WhatsApp suffered an outage on Wednesday in many parts of the world, with users in India also experiencing issues sending and receiving chats. The WhatsApp outage comes just two weeks after another global outage. Embarrassingly for Facebook, the social media giant that owns the messaging service, its own apps went down less than a week later.
As per Down Detector, a down time and issue tracking tool for websites and services that utilises crowdsourced user reports, most WhatsApp users (55 percent) are suffering connection issues, while 35 percent are facing problems with receiving messages. Ten percent are facing issues logging into WhatsApp itself. Issues began being reported at around 10:30pm IST.
At the time of writing, WhatsApp appeared to be up and running in India again, but Down Detector's outage map showed users in the US, Europe, Brazil, and other parts of South America are currently affected. The Independent reports problems were experienced as far as Malaysia, apart from the UK.
WhatsApp Messenger is used by more than 1.2 billion people around the world, with 200 million based in India. It has become one of the most frequently used modes of communication across the country, and is a nearly-indispensable service to remain in touch with friends, family, acquaintances, and even co-workers. So it comes as no surprise that a WhatsApp outage would be keenly observed and lamented, with users being forced to resort to other apps for their services.
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