WhatsApp apologises, fixes 2-hour outage issue

NEW DELHI: Meta-owned WhatsApp, which suffered a global outage including in India that lasted for over two hours, on Tuesday said it has fixed the issue and the services were back for its users.

Millions of Indians were unable to share videos and photos after celebrating a cracker of a Diwali as the popular messasing platform suffered a major outage.

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

Multiple users resorted to other messaging platforms like Telegram and even took the SMS route as they were unable to access WhatsApp -- a popular platform for millions of businesses in the festive season -- and failed to send videos, images and text on the platform.

According to website outage monitor website DownDetector, over 85 per cent of people reported problems while messaging, 11 per cent while using the app, and 3 per cent while using the website.

In India, the affected cities included Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Lucknow, among others. Users in the country faced trouble while sending images and videos.

People took to Twitter to report their problems with the app, including posting memes and GIFs.

"Today online, one tick for both deliver and read messages. Is WhatsApp down? #WhatsApp #whatsappdown," a user wrote on Twitter.

Users from several other countries also complained on social media that the service is currently creating a disturbance and not working smoothly.

In an earlier statement, a Meta spokesperson had said in a statement that they were working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.

WhatsApp had suffered a mega outage last year that left millions without the service for several hours, leading to a surge in new users on its rival Telegram.

The service went down as part of a massive outage that also took down Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and Facebook. That outage took nearly six hours before it was resolved.