WhatsApp Back Online After Widespread Outage

Instant messaging service WhatsApp is back online after almost two hours of being unavailable in India. Due to a technical glitch in its servers WhatsApp went down for most users across the country as users were unable to send any messages on individual and group chats. 

"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We've fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesman told news agency AFP.

WhatsApp service went down around 12.30 pm on Tuesday and was restored at 2.15 pm.

The outage was not limited to India, as it was reported by users across geographies including Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As of 1 pm IST, Downdetector showed a sharp spike in WhatsApp disruptions (28,413 reports).

This was the longest WhatsApp outage reported this year.

Users globally initially took the disruption to be a Wi-Fi or network issue only to discover that it was a WhatsApp outage.

Speaking on the disruption, a Meta spokesperson had earlier 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." 

WhatsApp has around 500 million users in India and globally it has around over 2.5 billion active users. The platform witnesses over five billion messages every day.