WhatsApp Goes Down Again: Second Major Outage Since Facebook Acquisition
WhatsApp, a mobile messaging platform, has recently experienced a service disruption. This was its second major outage after Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion. Users were facing lags and delays in sending and receiving messages.
The platform noted in its Twitter page that it had hit a record of 64 billion messages addressed within 24 hours. Out of the 64 billion messages, 20 billion messages were sent and 44 billion messages received worldwide.
Here is the tweet from WhatsApp's official Twitter account:
New daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours. - @WhatsApp
TechCrunch reported, "The service has been experiencing issues for roughly an hour, at least in some parts of the world, though we're working to confirm this right now with the company, which has yet to provide an official update on the situation via its WhatsApp Status Twitter account."
DownDetector.com, a Web site outage monitoring company, reported WhatsApp faces issues from 8:34 a.m. ET. Twitter is bombarded with messages from frustrated users across the world asking and discussing about the status of WhatsApp.
According to TOI, WhatsApp users on Android and Windows phones were unable to send and receive messages outright. Even though the messages were getting sent at one point, the recipients did not receive them for some time. But WhatsApp users on iPhone could not send messages for several minutes. But eventually they were able to send/receive messages.
The system error message from WhatsApp said, "Sorry, our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience." Here are some of the tweets from Twitter users on WhatsApp:
I would advise Facebook to change the name of what's app to what's down? #whatsapp — Raed Al-Emadi (@Ra_ed) April 2, 2014
Again Mark Zuckerberg messing with #Whatsapp server!! Server Down Again!! — Shree (@shri222) April 2, 2014
WhatsApp's last month service outage persisted for 210 minutes.
The service has been restored, but for many users it took some time to get their apps running at their regular speeds. The outage topped around 10 a.m. ET before the issue was brought back under control.
WhatsApp has experienced several outages and service disruptions. This was the second major outage after the Facebook acquisition.
In March, Hacker Bas Bosschert pointed out a vulnerability in the WhatsApp system that lets hackers access to the chat history of each account via apps. You can read about the potential vulnerability, here.
Post this news, a privacy groups Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last month asking for a ban on Facebook acquisition.
Are you facing WhatsApp outage?