WhatsApp down for hours yesterday! Here is the "reason" why

WhatsApp down was the horror cry from millions of users yesterday. And now, Meta has revealed the cause behind it.

Know the real reason behind the WhatsApp outage yesterday. (REUTERS)

Everything in the WhatsApp world was normal yesterday and then, Wham! The world came to a standstill! You would actually think so from the kind of reactions WhatsApp being down yesterday elicited from users. No, this isn't any script for any end-of-the-world movie but it was the result of an extremely important service going down yesterday – WhatsApp. The Meta-owned app went down for about 2 hours yesterday, halting communications worldwide. WhatsApp's mobile app, desktop app, as well as the WhatsApp Web all stopped working. Now, app experts have revealed the reason behind it. Not only the messaging service, but WhatsApp audio as well as video call functionality was also affected.

Speaking to India Today Tech, a company spokesperson said, “the brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part”. This, of course, was not very helpful in identifying the problem issue and there was no word about whether the same would not happen again.

The actual error message that was popping up when WhatsApp was down, was this, “Make sure your computer has an active internet connection”. It forced people to rush about checking whether their Internet had crashed. But that was not the case as WhatsApp itself had crashed. Users immediately took to Twitter to vent their frustrations over not being able to use the messaging app.

English YouTuber and rapper @KSI wrote on twitter, “I think WhatsApp is down. I've now realised how much I rely on WhatsApp lmao.”

The issue was fixed after nearly two hours but that resulted in other apps such as Telegram and Signal gaining users. A company spokesperson said in an emailed statement, “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We've fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.”

However, despite WhatsApp running again, many users still complained about various glitches including delays in messages sending and receiving and getting errors while updating status for a short period of time.

The outage is the longest of the year, and second only to the October 5, 2021 outage when WhatsApp became unresponsive for around 6 hours. The global outage affected countries like India, UK, Turkey, Italy, Indonesia and others.

Astonishingly, other Meta-owned apps such as Instagram, Facebook and Messenger remained unaffected by the WhatsApp outage.