WhatsApp suffers worldwide outage for over 30 minutes

Mumbai: For over half-and-hour people in India and elsewhere were not able to send WhatsApp messages and didn’t receive any new messages. The popular social media app suffered an outage around 2:15pm India time on Friday. The situation was resolved around 2.45 when WhatsApp started working again.

The WhatsApp down detector map shows that the service is suffering outage in parts of India, Europe and Asia, said media reports. A similar website that tracks outages for WhatsApp reported the same thing.

Reports said that it was a global outage, and for some people it may persist even now, so it seems that something wrong must have gone with WhatsApp global servers. However, what led to the outage is still not clear. For now there is no information from WhatsApp on what went wrong, not even a tweet.

Web services and apps go down for brief duration all the time, including services like Facebook and Gmail. However, given the popularity of WhatsApp – it is used by over a billion people – and the fact that people are using it all the time meant that as soon as it went down all hell broke loose. People took to Twitter to report how WhatsApp was down and wasn’t sending the messages anymore. There were some angry tweets, some funny ones. But within minutes the world became aware that WhatsApp was down.

This is first big outage WhatsApp has suffered in the last six months. Earlier on August 31, the services suffered a major outage in parts of Europe, Brazil and several other countries. Recently, WhatsApp rolled out new features, including a major feature that allowed users to recall messages. The feature is called ‘Delete For Everyone’. It is not clear if the latest WhatsApp outage is related to the new message recall feature.