WhatsApp, the Meta-owned instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, appears to be facing an outage, according to thousands of users.
The outage began at about 8:4am Tuesday, according to user complaints. WhatsApp has acknowledged the outage.
DownDetector and WaBetaInfo, two web services that track the Facebook app, have confirmed the outage. DownDetector, which received over 5,000 complaints about the glitch from users in a span of an hour, shows that U.S. and India are among those most impacted by the outage. India is the largest market of WhatsApp users.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”
WhatsApp has become a critical infrastructure in many markets, used by government officials, telecom service providers and of course, billions of people. As of 2020, the service was used to send over 100 billion messages a day, a figure that is unrivaled in the industry.
Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016. Apple chief executive Tim Cook said in May that iMessage and FaceTime were seeing record usage, but did not share specific figures. The last time Apple did share the figure, it was far behind WhatsApp’s then usage (podcast). WeChat, which has also amassed over 1 billion users, is behind in the daily volume of messages, too.
