Why WhatsApp Suffered A Severe Worldwide Outage
Whatsapp had an outage on Tuesday that affected more than 70,000 customers and made it impossible to send or receive messages.
Due to technical, error WhatsApp suffered a serious outage on Tuesday (October 25th) which prevented users around the world from using the platform. The service wasn’t working in several regions, including the U.S, Canada, parts of Europe, Asia and South Africa. Folks either couldn’t connect to the service at all, or their messages got stuck with the loading wheel and remained undelivered.
The problem, which started at around 3am ET, lasted for approximately 30 minutes in some regions. But Whatsapp remained patchy for hours elsewhere. There were approximately 70,000 reports of outages on the platform, according to data from according to Down Detector which tracks service disruptions around the world. The issue also affected the web version which couldn’t send messages either.
Speaking about the outage via Engadget, a spokesperson for the messaging app’s parent company Meta Platforms said, “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.” The representative also assured users that the technical error which caused the problem had been resolved.
WhatsApp has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses. When the platform experienced an hours-long outage last October, it hit trading of assets from crypto currencies to oil, before users switched to alternative of messaging apps. That glitch was caused by configuration error pushed by Facebook’s network engineers that effectively told the global internet that the service no longer had any servers online.
Although the update was rapidly reversed, it took many hours to filter out through the distributed systems that hold the internet together. Both Whatsapp incidents highlight the significance of vast hosting companies directing data around the internet, as well as the heavy reliance on single points of communication by the global population.
Jack Moore, an advisor at Slovakia-based cyber security firm ESET, said multiple areas will inevitably be significantly impacted as a result of Whatsapp’s downtime. “Along with a predicted financial hit, lessons from other times when the internet has gone down will hopefully have taught people to have access to other forms of communication,” he explained via Yahoo! Finance.
WhatsApp’s latest outage coincided with the Diwali festive season in India, which is its biggest market by user count. As a result, people who rely on the platform to send season’s greetings to family members across the globe were unable to. Shares of WhatsApp-parent Meta Platforms fell by 0.7% to $128.85 in premarket activity following the outage. But it recovered 4% in afternoon trading.
During the outage, more than 142,000 social media posts and memes flooded the internet. The words “Whatsapp Down” was also the number one trending topic on Twitter. “Everyone who noticed that Whatsapp is down came to Twitter to confirm it,” one user said.
In the past, rival apps like Telegram have seen temporary spikes in users when WhatsApp has been down. While the company boasts of over two billion monthly active users, becoming a mainstay for messaging in most countries, Telegram has taken up the challenger role with an impressive 700 million users.
