WhatsApp outages greet users in the New Year

It is probably not the best way to ring in the New Year but there was a brief WhatsApp outage in several parts of the world on New Year's day midnight. The outages were concentrated in England, Germany, the Netherlands as well as parts of Italy, Spain, Central Europe, and India. Elsewhere, outages were reported in Rio de Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Mumbai, Toronto etc. — basically in many populous areas of the world.

Downdetector reported outages occurring at around 9 am PT. The outage was, however, brief and the service was restored within an hour. A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the outage but did not state any reason for the same. In India, the service was down from 12 AM to 1 AM IST. The Facebook-owned company restored the service by 12:40 AM IST but it stopped working again before getting back fully online by 1 AM IST. Users could not see the blue ticks indicating the message has been delivered despite parties on both sides being online. Users started pouring out their frustration online and hashtags such as #WhatsAppisdown and #WhatsAppstoppedworking started trending on Twitter.

WhatsApp has become the default communication tool for many smartphone users and the service has developed to allow businesses to directly offer customer service. As such, the service could have temporarily crashed due to the massive exchange of New Year greetings all over the world. Thankfully, things are now back to normal and hopefully, stays that way.

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