WhatsApp Down—Here's Why

WhatsApp went down yesterday afternoon, leaving users unable to send any messages on the Meta-owned service. WhatsApp users complained that a timer was appearing on their messages, with the text failing to send.

The WhatsApp issue follows an outage of other Meta services Facebook and Instagram that took place in March.

So why was WhatsApp down, what happened and is the service back up and running?

WhatsApp went down yesterday afternoon, leaving users unable to send any messages on the Meta owned ... [+] service.

Just after 2pm EST, WhatsApp users started complaining of issues connecting to the service. Reporting the issue in droves on Down Detector—which shows a spike around that time—users said their WiFi was working fine, indicating that WhatsApp itself was the problem.

Facebook and Instagram users also reported issues viewing and creating posts.

WhatsApp owner Meta confirmed the issue via a status page for its business APIs, saying the outage also affects APIs connecting to Facebook Messenger and Instagram. This indicates the outage was not caused by a hack.

WhatsApp also took to X, formerly Twitter, to assure users it was working on a fix. The problem was fixed by just after 4pm EST.

I contacted Meta for a statement and was referred to the firm’s Twitter/X post.

WhatsApp is one of the most widely used messaging services in the world, with over 2 billion active users. While the Facebook and Instagram outages were a big deal, the WhatsApp one is even more impactful for the firm. It doesn’t happen often—the last WhatsApp outage was back in 2022.

Most of us use WhatsApp at some point every day. While I always advocate switching to services such as Signal, which aren’t owned by the same company as Facebook, you don’t always have a choice when friends and family stick to WhatsApp.

You just have to look at Twitter/X to see how annoyed people are.

The optics of outages don’t look good for Meta, but to give credit to the firm, at least services were back up and running within a couple of hours.

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