WhatsApp briefly experienced an outage on Friday afternoon, with thousands of users reporting issues. Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, recorded over 50,000 reports from users shortly after 3:30 PM GMT. The problems, which mainly affected users’ ability to send messages, were quickly resolved. A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed that the issue had been addressed, stating, “We know some people briefly had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp. We’ve fixed the issue.”
Some users also experienced issues with Facebook and Facebook Messenger, although the number of reports was much smaller compared to those for WhatsApp. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta and has nearly three billion users globally, is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. Meta’s last major global outage occurred in December, affecting both WhatsApp and Instagram.
At the end of January, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, told investors that the company was making strides toward becoming the leading messaging platform in the U.S., similar to its dominance in other parts of the world. In October, he shared that more than two billion calls were being made daily on WhatsApp.
Given the app’s massive user base, even minor glitches can impact millions of people worldwide. However, the recent technical issues affecting Meta’s apps have been far less significant than the major outage in 2021, when the company’s services were down for nearly six hours across the globe.
