The IT Ministry has asked Meta-owned WhatsApp to share reasons behind Tuesday's long outage of the messaging platform, says a report by news agency PTI. To recall, WhatsApp suffered the longest outage of the year on Tuesday (October 25) before services of the world's most popular messaging platform were restored for the mobile app, desktop and the web.
Meta told ABP Live that it had no comment on the report.
To recall, the WhatsApp outage on Tuesday affected its large user base not only in India but globally too. The Meta-owned messaging platform was not working on the mobile app, desktop, or even the Web. According to Downdetector.com, more than 19,000 users have reported on the platform that WhatsApp is down, with the outage seemingly beginning at around 12 pm (IST).
"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson told ABP Live.
Going by reports on Downdetector.com, the issue was not restricted to India but it also affected users globally.
"The 'brief' outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved," said another statement from Meta spokesperson.
According to the outage detection site Downdetector.com, the WhatsApp outage affected users in many cities in India such as Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai. #WhatsAppDown was already trending on Twitter, with users taking to the microblogging platform to share their frustrations and hilarious memes.
As mentioned earlier, this was the first major WhatsApp outage in 2022. The last major outage it saw was also its longest to date — as seen back in October 2021, when WhatsApp (as well as other Meta apps such as Instagram or Facebook) was down for nearly six hours. Going by Downdetector data, the WhatsApp outage this year lasted nearly two-and-a-half hours.