Popular chat app, WhatsApp experienced a global outage that prevented its billions of users from sending messages to their contacts and groups. The outage which lasted for more than ahour and half was noted few minutes past 8:00 Tuesday morning, West African Time.
Confirming that it had received litany of enquiries over the hiatus, online platform for enquiries on real-time information of status of web pages and services, DownDetector averred that it had within the hour received over 80,000 complaints from WhatsApp users across the globe.
The complainants toldDownDetector that they were unable to send or receive messages, sign up on the app, update their profile information and privacy settings.
Another online platform that tracks the WhatsApp app, WeBetaInfo, said the issue is ‘server-side’,an indication that it would not be fixed until Meta gets its resolved remotely.
A Meta spokesperson in statement to popular tech site, TechCrunch said: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”
The Meta-owned chat app is now back on course as it has rolled out a fix, resolving what could be termed as one of the most widespread outage of the popular social media platform.
Investigation by Techbooky showed that users can now send messages in groups and chats, while they update their profile and privacy settings.
WhatsApp has grown from a mere chat app to become a very critical infrastructure in many markets, with its adoption for use by government officials, telecom service providers and billions of people over the world. The chat platform was reported to have been used to send over 100 billion messages a day, as of 2020, a massive figure that hasn’t been rivaled in the social space.
It has also become a source of revenue for many small scale businesses in Nigeria and of course the African continent as they make use of the various chat groups on the app, the ‘status’ option to buy and sell their goods and services. It therefore portends that an outage by the Meta-owned app will cripple lot of SMEs in the continent.
It is believed that Meta Inc would permanently resolve this outage which has become consistent in recent years, even as it continues its foray and investment in the Metaverse mention.
Ayoola Faseyi, an Abuja based Journalist with interest in Technology and Politics. He is a versatile writer with articles in many renowned News Journals.He is the Co-Founder of media brand, The Vent Republic.
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