WhatsApp is back: Services restored after 2 hours of global outage

After an outage that lasted almost two hours, WhatsApp services were restored. The instant messaging platform was down for thousands of users in India and around the world.

Confirming that the services were restored, Meta in a statement said: “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience.”

However, the company did not share any further details on the reasons for this outage other than some ‘technical issue’.

The service outage impacted users across phone, and website. This also meant that WhatsApp business services and WhatsApp payment services were also down for the same time. According to Downdetector website nearly 29,000 reports were flagged by users on the WhatsApp outage.

Globally WhatsApp has 2 billion users. In India the platform has over 400 million users and over 15 million users are on WhatsApp small business apps. According to Businessofapps.com, over 100 billion WhatsApp messages are sent and over two billion minutes are spent on WhatsApp voice and video calls per day (this is a 2020 data point).

According to Meta’s Q2, 2022 earning calls, one billion users are messaging with a business each week across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. WhatsApp payment is still small in India with just about 7.43 million transactions for the month of September, with a value of Rs 631.63 crore. Compared to the total transaction of 6.78 billion across platforms like PhonePe, GooglePe, Paytm and others, with a transaction value of Rs 11.16 trillion.

Of course, such outages are not new to the platform or to the tech worlds. Rather such outages are becoming common across platforms. In 2021, Meta’s all three platforms Instagram, WhatsApp messenger and Facebook were down for six hours. This happened on October 4, 2021. The 2021 outage was due to the DNS failure issue. A DNS failure means users are unable to connect to an IP address using domain name. However, todays issue only impacted WhatsApp services and not the other Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

In a similar instance, Google too had seen disruption of its services across products like YouTube, Google Photos, Maps, Drive and Duo. This was also a global outage.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz