© Reuters. The WhatsApp logo in an illustrative photo taken on August 22, 2022. Photo: Dado Rovich/Reuters.
BENGALURU (Reuters) – The popular messaging app WhatsApp stopped working on Tuesday as users in Asia, Britain, South Africa and Europe reported problems sending and receiving messages and videos.
At around 0750 GMT, the website Down Detector, which specializes in tracking website crashes, showed that more than 68,000 users reported problems with the app in Britain, along with 19,000 in Singapore and 15,000 in South Africa.
The application has become an important means of communication, whether at the level of individuals or companies. And when the application stopped working for hours last October, the trading of assets from to oil was hit by a major jolt, before traders turned to alternative platforms such as Telegram.
The latest outage coincides with the festive season in India, its largest market by number of users, a period when citizens are using the application more than usual to exchange greetings.
A spokesperson for parent company Meta (NASDAQ:) Platforms said: “We are aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and are working to get WhatsApp back online for all users as soon as possible.”
The hashtag (WhatsApp Down) “WhatsApp is disabled” was widely circulated on Twitter, as it appeared in more than 70,000 tweets and hundreds of satirical photos on the Internet.
(Prepared by Ahmed El-Sayed for the Arab Bulletin – Editing by Mohamed Al-Yamani)