WhatsApp is back after a massive outage that kept the popular messaging platform out of reach of the masses for a few hours. What is unprecedented is the scale of the disruption given that the service was down in different part of the world at the same time.
The Facebook-owned service, however, didn’t specify what caused the service to crash, and that too in such a huge scale. The company though revealed they have done the needful and that the service is fully back to normal.
What is also interesting is that the outage didn’t affect all users, so to say. Many reported they were able to do their usual stuff on WhatsApp just fine.
What has also come to the fore is that the chat messenger was not accessible on any devices running Android, iOS or Windows Phone. Millions of users from various regions such as United States, Canada, Europe, India, and Brazil reported not being able to send or receive chat messages on WhatsApp.
However, it seems Europe has been the worst affected. The site Down Detector reported having received the maximum complaints from the region. The crisis also reached its peak at around 4 P.M. ET before tapering off gradually. Those affected said they got to see a seemingly unending ‘connecting’ message at the top.
There was no prior intimation as well about the probability of disruption in services, which proves it was purely unexpected. With all regions not having access to the chat messenger during the same time also proves it being a centralized issue. That again should have helped zeroing in on it and eliminating the same. That the authorities were able to rectify the problem in a matter of few hours is again commendable indeed.
What complicated matters all the more is that Messenger too had crashed during the same time, though fortunately, on a far lesser scale. Perhaps it wasn’t anything to with the technicalities; rather a sudden surge in its usage which maybe was more than it is designed to support.
