LONDON: People around the world reported problems sending and receiving messages on the popular chat app WhatsApp for almost two hours on Tuesday morning. The disruptions which began around 12:07 pm started easing after 2:15 pm with several users reporting that services have been restored. However, glitches took more time to go away fully.
According to Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, people started reporting problems around 12:07 pm, making this the longest outage WhatsApp has had. Nearly 29,000 reports were flagged by users.
"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We've fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson said.
Downdetector's heatmap showed WhatsApp users in major Indian cities, including Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata were impacted by the disruption. India is the app's biggest market by user base.
According to DownDetector, over 85 per cent of people reported problems while messaging, 11 per cent while using the app, and 3 per cent while using WhatsApp web.
WhatsApp has around two billion users, who rely on it for communication and payment services. The exact cause of the remains unclear. Meanwhile, other Meta-owned services, such as Instagram and Facebook are working fine in India.
People took to Twitter to report their problems with Facebook family apps, including posting hilarious memes and GIFs.
"Today online, one tick for both deliver and read messages. Is WhatsApp down? #WhatsApp #whatsappdown," a user wrote on Twitter.
Meta, previously known as Facebook, bought WhatsApp in 2014.
It's wildly popular especially outside of the US, where many people use it for everyday communication.
On October 5 last year, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users for several hours, leading to a surge in Telegram new users.
(With inputs from AP)