The popular messaging service WhatsApp was offline for about two hours for users around the world on Tuesday morning due to a malfunction. According to international news agencies, some users are able to send and receive messages again. Users in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, among others, were unable to send messages. It is not yet known when the problem will be completely solved and what the nature of the malfunction was.
Also in countries in Asia and Africa, such as South Africa, Singapore and India, many tens of thousands of users had problems with the app. The problem started according to the website Down detector, which keeps track of online disruptions, around 9 a.m. Dutch time. Just after 11 a.m., the number of reports dropped sharply.
A spokesman for Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, told Reuters news agency that the company is “aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages.” “We are working to restore WhatsApp to everyone as soon as possible.” Meta, which also suffered a major technical failure last year, said nothing about the nature of the problem.
According to Downdetector, there appeared to be no similar problems with the social media Facebook and Instagram, including platforms that fall under Meta. That was the case with the outage last year. WhatsApp is used by more than two billion people in more than 180 countries worldwide, says the messaging service yourself. In the Netherlands, about 12.5 million people use WhatsApp.
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