Nothing to see here, folks. WhatsApp messaging service has been restored now.
Highlights:
- According to tweets and reports, WhatsApp was down last night for a brief period
- The messaging app is now working as usual
As if denied of all the air and water on the planet, netizens around the globe raised the roof on Twitter last night when they believed WhatsApp had stopped working on their smartphones. Though the Facebook-owned company has released no official statement about a temporary breakdown in its messaging service, reports and tweets by users suggest WhatsApp had had a brief downtime at around 11:30 PM IST last night. WhatsApp appears to be working just fine on our smartphones at the time of writing this.
Searching for the term #WhatsAppDown on Twitter yields a long list of tweets related to the temporary disruption in service. While some tweets are genuine reports of WhatsApp’s failure, others are witty remarks about people’s reaction to the news of its failure. Some tweets suggest WhatsApp broke down in numerous countries but continued to work in Nigeria. Tweets from India and Pakistan suggest WhatsApp never broke down at all.
Outages on messaging services and social media sites occur from time to time but don’t last for very long. If anything, they give users online an opportunity to make jokes about them publicly. In fact, WhatsApp suffered an unexpected three-hour downtime just three days after it was acquired by Facebook in early 2014. In May last year WhatsApp suffered from a minor bug that made the app crash every time the user inserted a specific special character in the textbox.
WhatsApp was recently in the news for receiving an update that limits forwarding of messages. Rolled out first to Indian users in July 2018 in an attempt to curb the spread of fake news, the update is now rolling out to users globally. The latest version of WhatsApp restricts forwarding of messages and media to a maximum of five contacts. The limit was previously twenty users for global users.
Related Read: WhatsApp is globally implementing message forwarding limit of five users
Everybody checking on Twitter if #Whatsapp is down (including me) reminds me of childhood days when everyone would check with neighbours to confirm a power cut. pic.twitter.com/V0qLKVzcZe
— Nishant Kumar (@MarkeloN07) 22 January 2019
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Vignesh Giridharan
Progressively identifies more with the term ‘legacy device’ as time marches on. View Full Profile
