Currently, Whatsapp is down worldwide. The social media platform is facing a global outage, affecting its 2 billion users worldwide.
The issue began around 2 PM ET (6pm GMT) on Wednesday, with users experiencing difficulties connecting to the service and encountering a perpetual “connecting” status. This outage appears to be widespread, with users from various countries affected.
Despite being owned by Meta, WhatsApp doesn’t have its own status page, and it’s not listed on Meta’s service status either. Interestingly, other Meta services like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are unaffected, highlighting that the issue is specific to WhatsApp. While messages can still be composed, they won’t be delivered until WhatsApp’s services are restored.
This outage follows closely after a recent Meta outage that affected Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads, lasting approximately two hours. Notably, WhatsApp was unaffected during that incident. Such widespread outages are rare for WhatsApp, with the last major disruption occurring in 2022 when the service was offline for two hours.
It’s important to note that while this issue persists, Meta’s other services continue to function normally, indicating that the problem is isolated to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is a popular messaging app that allows users to send text messages, voice messages, images, videos, documents, and make voice and video calls over the internet. It was founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who were former employees of Yahoo!. In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion.
Key features of WhatsApp include end-to-end encryption, which ensures that only the sender and recipient can read the messages, group chats where multiple users can participate in a conversation, status updates where users can share photos, videos, and text with their contacts for 24 hours, and WhatsApp Web, which allows users to access their WhatsApp account from a desktop or laptop computer.
WhatsApp has become one of the most widely used messaging apps globally, with over 2 billion monthly active users as of 2022. It is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and desktop operating systems. WhatsApp is free to download and use, and it does not display ads, relying instead on a subscription model for businesses and enterprise users through WhatsApp Business.
The app has faced criticism for its privacy practices, particularly after its acquisition by Facebook, as well as concerns about the spread of misinformation and fake news through the platform. However, WhatsApp has implemented measures to combat these issues, such as limiting message forwarding and introducing features to help users identify forwarded messages.