Messaging platform, WhatsApp, stopped working for users across the world including in South Africa on Tuesday morning.
Users of the platform that Meta owns began reporting issues in the morning.
Website Down Detector said more than twelve thousand reports were posted within half an hour. Many people have complained on social media that they cannot send or receive messages.
So I was checking my network but actually I got to check on Twitter that the WhatsApp is down. @WhatsApp#WhatsAppDown pic.twitter.com/FGazaT78z6
— SHAMIM AKHTAR (@ShamimA51464189) October 25, 2022
Those who are using the Application for work and business were mostly affected by the malfunction of the application.
The Application has about two billion global active users.
A social media major outage on Facebook occurred just over a year ago, when Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp went down for about five hours.
Before that Facebook’s biggest outage was in 2019, when a technical issue brought down the services for nearly 24 hours, preventing WhatsApp users from sending messages and Instagram users from viewing other profiles.
A spokesperson for WhatsApp’s parent company Meta Platforms commented that they were aware that some of the people were having trouble sending messages and they were working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.
WhatsApp came back after a few hours of being down.
BREAKING NEWS: WhatsApp is back!
— Alhaji TripleHay👑 (@Boi_TripleHay) October 25, 2022
Additional reporting by Reuters
