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Users around the world reported being unable to send and receive messages on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is back online after a major global outage this morning (25 October).
Problems were first reported with the Meta-owned messaging service at roughly 8:17am Irish time, according to DownDetector. There were more than 70,000 reports of connection issues in the UK and more than 3,400 in Ireland at one point.
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a Meta spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com.
They said earlier in the day that the company had been working to “restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible”.
The issue appeared to be resolved within two hours. Meta has not yet commented on what caused the outage.
WhatsApp has around 2bn users worldwide. According to reports on DownDetector, the WhatsApp outage affected users in countries around the world, with many going onto Twitter to share the issues they were having.
Some users claimed a message was showing at the top of the app, saying it was “connecting” to the server. Conversations could still be accessed and earlier messages could be read, but the app was failing to send new messages.
“WhatsApp’s services are relied on by billions around the world, making this incident an unfortunate milestone for its parent company Meta,” said Mark Boost, CEO of cloud-native service provider Civo.
“With scale comes increased levels of complexity. The more moving parts there are, the more likely one can malfunction and disrupt the whole cloud service. WhatsApp’s current outage is one of a series of major outages Meta has suffered, and it likely won’t be the last.”
This is the first major outage WhatsApp has suffered since October 2021, when multiple Meta apps and services including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram were down for more than six hours. That outage affected all of the company’s 3.5bn users across the world, and was caused by a “cascading network issue”.
Meta faced another outage earlier this year. In March, apps including Facebook and Instagram suffered a brief outage. At the time, Meta said this was due to a “technical issue” that caused some people to have trouble accessing its apps and services.
This is an updated version of an article that was originally published at 9.41am on Tuesday, 25 October 2022.
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