WhatsApp resumes after an outage in India, several other countries

A website that tracks social comments around trending issues said people were reporting issues from Italy, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Germany, India, the US and Sri Lanka.

The reason for the outage wasn’t immediately known. (Reuters File Photo)

WhatsApp users in India and several other countries experienced an outage of the messaging service on Friday, with customers saying they were unable to send or receive messages. The app, however, is back up after an hour-long global outage.

A website that tracks social comments around trending issues said people were reporting issues from Italy, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Germany, India, the US and Sri Lanka. More details on the nature and cause of the outage weren't immediately available.

"Earlier today, WhatsApp users globally had trouble accessing the app for about an hour. This issue has been fixed and we apologize for the inconvenience," a WhatsApp spokesperson said.

Downdetector.in, website that tracks outages of internet services, reported a big spike in number of outages. According to its Live Outage Map, the service was down in parts of Asia including India and in a few European countries.

Another outage tracking platform, Outage.report, revealed more than 400 reports of WhatsApp outage. According to its heat map, southern and western parts of India were mostly affected.

Users were complaining about problems they were facing on Twitter.

So whatsapp down for a couple of minutes and made headlines worldwide.

— Rabia Anum (@RabiaAnumm) November 3, 2017

INSTANT MESSAGING app WhatsApp down in many parts of the world; DownDetector says problem could be global.

— BusinessDaily Africa (@BD_Africa) November 3, 2017

Whatsapp msg not sent:
Step 1: Restart Mobile Data
Step 2: Restart phone
Step 3: Check #Twitter#whatsappdown trending. Now I feel better!

— HAMZA KHAN ♡ (@HamzaGayaskhan) November 3, 2017

A few users were able to see the funny side of the things.

*I am expecting this*
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a WhatsApp Customer Sevice employee who did this on the employee's last day. He's an Indian & just wanted to scare BJP before elections.
-WhatsApp 😋😋😋
#WhatsAppDown

— Saniya Sayed (@Ssaniya25) November 3, 2017

1000 people have already died in India.!!
Because of they can't forward the chain msges to 10 people..!!#WhatsAppDown

— Yash Patel😎 (@its_yp311) November 3, 2017

We've reached out to the company for more information about the outage.