- WhatsApp is down.
- South African users started to report weird behaviour, then unavailability, on Tuesday morning.
- Initial reports suggest the problem is also being experienced in Europe and India.
- Here's what we know about the WhatsApp outage.
- For more stories, go to www.BusinessInsider.co.za.
WhatsApp is down, in what appears to be an extended outage affecting both South Africa and many other parts of the world.
The service started to behave oddly on Tuesday morning, users across all South African mobile networks reported.
Similar reports have come in from Europe and India.
Initially, users were seeing a single tick when attempting to send messages. By the time of publication, users were seeing the clock icon – indicating that messages were still being sent – and no messages appeared to be going through.
Some users attempting to use WhatsApp via a web browser saw the error message "Make sure your computer has an active internet connection". Those with an open WhatsApp Web instance were confronted with the message "Retrying...", and the invitation to click a link to retry.
Frustrated users reported restarting WhatsApp, and rebooting their phones, as well as blaming wifi and mobile data connections, before realising the problem was with WhatsApp.
The outage is affecting both person-to-person and group chats.
WhatsApp did not immediately confirm the outage, or provide other details.
In October 2021, a little over one year ago, platforms owned by Facebook parent company Meta suffered a global outage, leaving WhatsApp down along with Facebook messenger.
In that instance, WhatsApp confirmed the outage by way of its Twitter account, and Meta also provided information by way of Twitter, much to the delight of that competitor.
See also | Twitter trolled Facebook about its outage – and WhatsApp was pretty cool about it
That 2021 outage lasted for several hours. The company later said it had been caused by incorrect configuration changes to its routers.
With the cause of WhatsApp being down still unknown, it was also not known if messages users attempted to send during the outage would be delivered once it is resolved.
