WhatsApp, a popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc, suffered a global outage for about an hour on Sunday before the problem was fixed.
“WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved”, a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. The cause of the outage, about an hour long, was not immediately known.
In India, its biggest market with about 200 million of its billion-plus users, the app was down just a few minutes past midnight into the new year.
Users in other countries also complained of outages on social media.
Earlier, on Dec 1, 2017, WhatsApp was back online for its 1 billion daily users after the app experienced an unexplained outage for a brief period.
Similarly, on Nov 3, WhatsApp users were able to send and receive messages after a brief suspension in Pakistan and several other countries.
Apart from Pakistan, there reports that WhatsApp was not working for users in the UK, Singapore, India, Middle East and Ukraine.
According to IT expert Touseef Ikram, the WhatsApp outage started at around 1:10PM and lasted for 45 minutes for most parts of the world. “While this is the first outage that affected Pakistan to this extent it is not the first time WhatsApp was down or having issues. In October alone it faced these issues five times, in September 15 times and in August 11 times.”
Mr Ikram added that WhatsApp was pursuing an aggressive upgradation strategy to combat rivals such as Snapchat and to start the monetization process through WhatsApp business. “These issues could be related to making these structural changes in the chat app which probably was not envisioned back in 2009 when it started.” (Reuters)
