Why did WhatsApp go down? Users unable to send or receive messages on Wednesday

Users around the world reported that the popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, had gone down. There are numerous reports and posts online suggesting that users were unable to receive messages, but messages sent will be in limbo until service resumes.

The company has not yet issued a statement on the outages. 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.

Service status website Down Detector received more than 20,000 reports of WhatsApp outages on Wednesday afternoon. WhatsApp is one of the most used apps in the world with more than two billion global active users.

Just last month parent company Meta suffered a major outage which affected Facebook and Instagram costing the company an astonishing amount of money in the brief time that the services were unusable. X account @whatdope estimated how much it was costing Meta to have an outage back in 2021.

“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,” they wrote.

This breaking news story will be updated.