WhatsApp appears to be facing an outage

WhatsApp, the Meta-owned instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, appears to be facing an outage, according to users. The outage began about 12.20 AM PT, 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 shows that users in the U.S. and India are among those most impacted by the outage. India is the largest market of WhatsApp by users.

In a statement to TechCrunch, 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 unrivalled 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 daily volume of messages, too.

Users are seeing several errors accessing WhatsApp, including the app’s inability to connect to the server.

While Facebook looks into the issue, here are some stories to read while your phone remains silent:

(More to follow)

WhatsApp appears to be facing an outage by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch