WhatsApp longest outage ever: This is what Meta had to say about it

WhatsApp faced its worst crash ever in many of its prominent markets including India and UK. Early afternoon on Tuesday, the platform started working erratically and within minutes users stopped getting any texts and weren't even able to send them. The outage also affected the video calling and voice calling feature. Even the Status sharing feature was inaccessible to many users. Initially WhatsApp acknowledged the issue and claimed that it was working on a fix. Almost 90 minutes- 2 hours later, the service was back online. 

WhatsApp has failed to provide a detailed explanation as to what was the reason behind the massive outage. The instant messaging platform claimed that the outage happened due to a technical error. So far, WhatsApp hasn’t described this “technical error” or the impact it had on the users. A Meta spokesperson told Business Today, "The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved." 

Last year, in early October, Meta had faced a major outage. That outage caused services to crash across its biggest platforms: Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta. The outage happened twice in a single week. In the month of March 2021, another outage rocked WhatsApp and Instagram which led to a 45-minute downtime.

WhatsApp has been a major platform for India, Asia and other markets including Europe and Africa. Not only individual users, even Businesses rely on the services provided by the platform. Features such as WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Pay were also paralysed during the outage on Tuesday. In the past, outages have prompted users to look for alternatives in the market. Options such as Telegram and Signal benefited heavily from the outage that happened in October 2021.

WhatsApp has grand plans for its application, despite the outages. The platform plans to introduce a new mega feature called communities. This new feature will help the app stay ahead of competition from Telegram. Telegram channels have this unique model of broadcasting and WhatsApp will be launching its own version of this feature in the form of Communities. This feature will essentially be a Group of WhatsApp Groups. It will enable a higher number of participants in a single thread.