Why did WhatsApp go down? Users unable to send or receive messages on Tuesday
The popular messaging app experienced technical difficulties with reports of widespread outages and connection issues this morning.
Users around the world reported that the popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, had gone down on Tuesday morning. There were numerous reports and posts online suggesting that users were unable to send or receive messages, but the problem now appears to have been resolved for many.
Reports of issues on the Meta-owned messaging service first surfaced in Europe on Tuesday morning and the problem appears to be a global outage.
Service status website Down Detector received more than 50,000 reports of WhatsApp outages on Monday morning. WhatsApp is one of the most used apps in the world with more than two billion global active users.
The company has not yet issued a statement on the outages but the issue now appears to be resolved for most users.
However this will have been a major inconvenience to many who rely on the service’s cross-platform messaging for everything from workplace organisation to family group chats.
In 2021 Meta suffered a major outage which affected Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, costing the company an astonishing amount of money in the brief time that the services were unusable.
In response to that outage, Twitter account @whatdope wrote: “Last year’s ad revenue (for Facebook’s sites) was $84.2bn. So, for every minute it’s down, they’re losing around $160,000. Or, $2,670 per second”.
The profitability of WhatsApp is thought to be considerably less than that of the other Facebook-owned sites, but engineers will have worked desperately to bring the service back online. In recent years WhatsApp has faced increased competition from rival apps such as Telegram and Signal.
More on this breaking news story as it develops.