Last updated on October 11th, 2023 at 07:52 pm

WhatsApp, the Meta-owned instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, appears to be facing an outage, according to thousands of users.

The outage began at about 8:04am Tuesday, according to user complaints. WhatsApp has acknowledged the outage.

DownDetector and WaBetaInfo, two web services that track the Facebook app, have confirmed the outage. DownDetector, which received over 5,000 complaints about the glitch from users in a span of an hour, shows that U.S. and India are among those most impacted by the outage.

India is the largest market of WhatsApp users.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson 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.”

WhatsApp has become a critical infrastructure in many markets, used by government officials, telecom service providers and of course, billions of people. As of 2020, the service was used to send over 100 billion messages a day, a figure that is unrivaled in the industry.

Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016. Apple chief executive Tim Cook said in May that iMessage and FaceTime were seeing record usage, but did not share specific figures.

The last time Apple did share the figure, it was far behind WhatsApp’s then usage (podcast). WeChat, which has also amassed over 1 billion users, is behind in the daily volume of messages, too.

WhatsApp restores service after Nigeria, UK, 12 others experienced outage

The popular Meta-owned social media messaging platform, WhatsApp, restored its services yesterday after billions of users in different parts of world, including Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States and 12 other countries, experienced outage for some hours.

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.

A technology tracker firm, Down Detector, confirmed that the platform did not work in several countries.

Apart from Nigeria, other countries affected in the problem, according to Down Detector, include: South Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Uganda, Zambia, the United Kingdom, and parts of the United States.

It claimed the problem started on Monday by 7: 00pm but was not obvious.

It noted that around 8:00 am yesterday, users of the platform started reporting inability to send or receive messages.

In response to the development, Meta spokesperson, in a statement released yesterday, said the company acknowledged the outage, adding that it was working to get it fixed.

The statement read: “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.”

However, WhatsApp services are back online and the app now working for Android and iOS apps as well as via WhatsApp Web.

In October 2021, WhatsApp and other Meta products suffered a six-hour outage that multiple security experts also blamed a domain name system, DNS, issue as possible culprit.

The outage yesterday is the second in 2022, 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