Popular messaging app WhatsApp stopped working for many people across the world on Tuesday, with users in Asia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Europe reporting issues sending and receiving texts and videos.
At around 7:50 a.m. GMT, outage reporting site Downdetector showed over 68,000 users had reported problems with the app in the United Kingdom. Problems were reported by 19,000 people in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa, it said.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company is aware that some people are having trouble sending messages and is working to restore service as quickly as possible.
Meta, previously known as Facebook, bought WhatsApp in 2014. It’s wildly popular especially outside of the U.S., where many people use it for everyday communication.
Meta has also acknowledged the outage and said is currently working on a fix.
"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," a Meta spokesperson told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Social media users in Türkiye shared on Twitter that WhatsApp was down at around 10 a.m local time, with some users explaining that sent messages were not being delivered, but some messages were still being received.
The outage was affecting both personal chats as well as group chats. WhatsApp's WhatsApp Web feature, which is used on desktop computers, was also down.
The app has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses. When Whatsapp had an hours-long outage last October, it hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to oil, before traders switched to alternative platforms such as Telegram.
The app's latest outage comes during the festive season in India – its biggest market by user count – when people use the platform even more than usual to send season's greetings.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may have affected a larger number of users.
On Twitter, #whatsappdown was trending, with more than 70,000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet.