WhatsApp this week: Everything from animated stickers to global outage

WhatsApp suffered a major global outage earlier this week with users in India, the US, UK and South America facing issues with sending and receiving messages.

FILE PHOTO: Silhouettes of laptop and mobile device users are seen next to a screen projection of Whatsapp logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo (REUTERS)

Facebook has been consistently introducing new features on WhatsApp in the past couple of weeks. The messaging app recently got a new QR codes feature that enables WhatsApp users to connect with people who are not in their contact list. In addition to this, WhatsApp also got animated stickers, which widened the scope of the creatives that can be shared on the platform.

This week we saw the company gearing to introduce more such features on the popular messaging platform.

As per a report by WABetaInfo, the blog site that obsessively reports developments in WhatsApp, Facebook is planning to add the functionality to bring looping animated stickers to the messaging platform.

To give you some context, when Facebook introduced animated stickers on WhatsApp, users could only see the animation once. They had to scroll up or down to see the animation again. Now, the social media giant is planning to add a new functionality to the feature that would allow users to watch the animation in a loop. This feature is still in the developmental stage and so it would some time before the company rolls it out to its users across the globe.

In addition to updates to its animated stickers feature, the company is also working on bringing WhatsApp contacts shortcut to iPhone's share sheet. Up until now, iPhone users can share content from other platforms only with the iMessage and Messenger users using the iPhone's share sheet functionality. This week, the blog site demonstrated how this feature would function when this feature is made available on the main app.

Apart from the upcoming features, we also saw WhatsApp suffering a major global outage this week. The issue began at around 1AM on July 15 with users in the US, UK, South America and India facing issues with sending and receiving messages. The issue was resolved two hours later at around 3AM.