WhatsApp Experiences Global Outage For Several Hours (UPDATED)

UPDATE (5:00 PM): It appears WhatsApp is back to being operational. As of 4:59 PM, messages that initially couldn’t be sent went through in a lump sum.

At the time of writing, neither Meta nor the official WhatsApp Twitter account has released an explanation, addressing the reasons as to why the service was down throughout the world.

ORIGINAL STORY (4:07 PM):

WhatsApp is down on a global scale right now, so if you’re wondering why your messages aren’t getting posted or why messages aren’t being received, that’s why. We can confirm the outage, given that several of our personal messages are have not been sent over or read.

Even the massively popular WhatsApp-centric site, WABetaInfo, confirmed the outage, posting a tweet on the matter. Several of its followers suggest that the Meta-owned messaging service may be having issues with its AWS servers although we have not seen any substantial proof so far.

WhatsApp is experiencing an issue when connecting to the server. #whatsappdown

— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) October 25, 2022

On the other hand, reports of the WhatsApp outage began flowing from users into the renowned downtime tracker platform Downdetector after it apparently went dark around 2:45 PM today. Since the outage happened without any prior warning or even explanation from WhatsApp or its parent company Meta, users have scrambled to various platforms to find out whether they were the only ones that were not able to utilize the service or if it affected other users too.

Naturally, this has led to the creation of memes related to the incident with many of them labelled with the #WhatsAppDown hashtag:

When your WhatsApp is playing up but you come to Twitter and see that everyone else is having the same problem #WhatsAppDown pic.twitter.com/pMcJm0Zn56

— Jamie (@GingerPower_) October 25, 2022

Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time that WhatsApp has gone down without any warning though. Back in 2019, the service along with other Meta’s major apps including Facebook and Instagram was hit by a widespread outage that last approximately 12 hours, before coming back online.

However, Meta did reveal the reason that caused the October 2019’s outage which was a misconfiguration within the company’s backbone routers. As for today’s WhatsApp incident, we haven’t heard any explanation so far.

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