WhatsApp Not Working? Popular Chat App Facing Irregular Outages Globally, Says Report

WhatsApp messages not going through can be an incredibly frustrating affair, and according to reports, WhatsApp users around the world may have faced irregular and inconsistent outages from the popular chat application, all through yesterday, August 20. The outage did not affect one country in particular, and WhatsApp services were intermittently down across various parts of the world. According to reports, the issue rose out of unspecified issues that caused server downtime for WhatsApp. As a result of the issue, WhatsApp users may have found themselves unable to login to their own accounts, hence also being unable to send or receive messages. Any new WhatsApp account registration may have also remained broken through yesterday and the early hours of today, August 21. Reliable WhatsApp-centric blog, WABetaInfo, issued an update recently that all WhatsApp services are now being restored back to normal.

Any downtime for WhatsApp becomes a much discussed matter across social media, given the app’s sheer popularity across the world. WhatsApp presently has over 2 billion active users around the world, which accounts for over a quarter of the entire world’s population. In India, WhatsApp has over 400 million active users, making it the most popular app in the country as well. However, its massive popularity also translates to considerably heavy load on its servers, which WhatsApp has succumbed to in recent times. The service faced a brief outage in India only a short while ago, although the impact of the outage was limited since it happened in the late night hours.

Popular services facing downtime can have major consequences to everyday lives, as was seen yesterday with Google services. Through the day, Google’s apps such as Gmail, Google Chat, Google Drive, Google Keep and Google Meet faced issues, such as emails failing to attach files, chat messages not being sent, files not getting uploaded on Drive and Meet video calls not getting recorded. The issues appeared to stem from a prolonged server-end bug at Google’s end, which was only resolved towards the end of the day.

WhatsApp’s latest outage appears to have not affected too many users in India yesterday, since there were very few reports of unexpected outage of the app on popular social media platforms. The fix has been issued from WhatsApp’s server end itself, and users are not required to download any updates to the app to fix any inconsistent connectivity issues.