Whatsapp outage leads to outrage

New Delhi/London: WhatsApp was hit by a major outage on Friday affecting millions of users around the world, including India. People were unable to send or receive messages using the app because of a server problem. Service was restored later. Chats and contacts were able to load but once a user opened a chat box, the app just showed a “connecting” message so that new messages couldn’t be sent or received.

The problems are focused in western Europe and Asia, but were reported across the world, Independent reported. According to posts on various social media platforms, users complained that they were unable to send or receive messages for about 30 minutes on Friday afternoon. India is home to over 200 million WhatsApp users and more than one billion users globally. In August, there was a similar outage with services being affected in various parts of the world.

Users turned to platforms like Facebook and Twitter to vent out their frustration at not being able to use the service with ‘#WhatsAppDown’ beginning to trend. A popular tweet read: “2 mins of silence for those who uninstalled and then installed WhatsApp again #WhatsAppDown”. Another trending tweet was “WhatsApp msg not sent: Step 1: Restart Mobile Data Step 2: Restart phone Step 3: Check #Twitter #WhatsAppDown trending”.