Abubakar Yunusa, Abuja
WhatsApp, the instant web-based messaging service used by billions of people across the world, is now working — after an outage that lasted for hours.
Around 8 am on Tuesday, users of the Meta-owned platform started reporting that they were unable to send or receive messages.
The outage affected both personal and group chats alike.
WhatsApp Web was also affected by the outage, with the app’s web client unable to access the platform.
Data on Down Detector, the tech outage tracker, confirmed WhatsApp was not working in several countries.
Down Detector data on WhatsApp outage as of October 25
Among the countries affected were South Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Uganda, Zambia, the United Kingdom, and parts of the United States.
Meta earlier acknowledged the outage and also shared a statement that it was working to get it fixed.
“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 on Tuesday.
It is, however, understood that WhatsApp services are back online and the app now working for Android and iOS apps as well as via WhatsApp Web.
Some users have taken to social media to confirm that the service is now working.
In October 2021, WhatsApp and other Meta products suffered a six-hour outage that multiple security experts had blamed a domain name system (DNS) issue as a possible culprit.
The outage was the second in 2021 with the first happening in March.
It also marked the worst outage for the tech giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day.
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