chat app
Fixed hours of disruption: Whatsapp went down around the globe
The WhatsApp outage is affecting users around the world
© AFP
Whatsapp is the most popular chat app in the world. Now the messenger struggled for hours with a total failure.
Chatting with friends, sending a photo to mom or holding a meeting with work colleagues via video call – Whatsapp is an important communication platform for more than two billion people. This was gone in one fell swoop on Tuesday: the messenger servers around the world could not be reached for several hours.
The problem was easy to identify: if you started the app, it opened the chats as usual instead of loading the latest messages, but only the wheel turned at the top, which indicates a connection to the server. New status messages were not loaded either, phone calls and chats were on strike.
Whatsapp outage: Complaints worldwide
It’s no wonder that the line on the “All disturbances” platform was practically glowing: more than 180,000 Germans reported there in a very short time that their beloved messenger was not working at the moment.
But they were not alone. Twitter received new complaints about server problems every second under the hashtag “#whatsappdown” from all over the world. India in particular – by far the largest Whatsapp nation in terms of number of users – struggled with the failure. There the messenger is not only used for communication, recently you can even buy groceries there.
Whatsapp failure: the cause has not yet been clarified
What exactly was behind the failure is not yet known. Whatsapp itself has not commented on the outage either on its blog or on its Twitter account. Unlike Whatsapp, the other services of the parent company Meta, Facebook and Instagram, were still available.
As long as Whatsapp didn’t work, users had to switch to other services such as SMS, Snapchat or Whatsapp competitors such as Signal or Telegram. You can find out how to set up Signal in this text.
Sources: all disturbances, Twitter, Whatsapp blog
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