WhatsApp down globally: A deja vu moment for users worldwide

It was a deja vu moment for users of the messaging platform WhatsApp when the app's services came to a grinding halt on Tuesday afternoon, bringing back memories of a similar outage that had hit the app on a Monday in October 2021. On October 25, WhatsApp stopped working for people around the world, including countries like the United Kingdom, India, Singapore, Italy, Turkey, South Africa.

The outage started at around noon in India and lasted close to two hours. In these two hours none of the features like calling, WhatsApp web or status worked.

A similar outage had happened on October 4 in 2021 when all apps under the Meta family had stopped working in what was speculated to be a cyberattack. However, Meta had clarified that the culprit responsible for the outage was nothing but its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers. The services were eventually restored after 5 hours.

In 2020, Meta and its family of apps had been down for about 2 hours in the wee hours July 15, Wednesday.

The 2- and 5-hour long outages seem still better than the 24-hour long outage from 2019 which was due to “routine maintenance operation,” according to Meta, it had accidentally triggered a bug affecting Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the last four years, this was company's fourth largest outage and though services have been restored, the reason behind the outage remains unknown. As of 2020, WhatsApp is used to send over 100 billion messages per day and is being used for business communications not only between people but governments as well. So, any outage potentially affects business and government-related tasks unexpectedly.

Also read: Whatsapp Downtime: Top social media Outages

Also read: WhatsApp down, we're working to restore services as soon as possible: Meta spokesperson

Also read: WhatsApp restored after an hour of disruption; likely to be app's longest-ever outage