WhatsApp said the service was restored on Tuesday after a brief outage that left users around the world unable to send or receive messages for several hours.
Both personal and group chats were affected by the outage. The outage also affected WhatsApp Web, with the app’s web client not having access to the platform. People trying to send and receive messages on WhatsApp, which has about two billion users worldwide, began reporting problems.
Within half an hour, more than 12,000 messages were posted, according to service status website Down Detector, which tracks outage reports, but after two hours users began posting online that WhatsApp was back to normal.
It has been confirmed that this is a global WhatsApp problem affecting users worldwide and not just in one country.
A WhatsApp spokesman said the company was aware that some users were having trouble sending messages, that the issue had been fixed and that the company apologised for the inconvenience.
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today,” it said in a statement. “We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience.”
The sources for this piece include an article in NPR.