While you were busy celebrating the coming of 2018, WhatsApp stopped working for a lot of people around the world, including India, as it suffered a server issue.
While you were busy making new year resolutions and celebrating the end of another year, WhatsApp suffered a massive global outage. At the stroke of midnight, the popular messaging application stopped working for a lot of people around the world. A lot of people, including folks here in India found themselves unable to send new year wishes to their friends and family creating a lot of confusion and chaos. The app stopped working for around 1 hour -- approx from 12AM to 1AM (India time), however services have now been restored and WhatsApp is working fine.
India is one of the key markets for Facebook owned WhatsApp, as the application is used by millions, and the number is only on the rise. The reason behind the outage was possibly because of heavy usage of the app to send in New Year greetings to family and friends. Users were able to send messages, but they were not getting delivered to the recipient, as it showed only one single grey tick and no blue tick even though the internet connection of both the sender and the receiver was working perfectly fine.
Soon after, users, obviously angry because they were unable to send New Year greetings to their friends took to Twitter to talk about WhatsApp's server down. Some users also received notifications like -- "Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience." Soon, hastags like -- #WhatsAppisdown, #WhatsAppstoppedworking started trending on Twitter and users started posting angry statuses and funny memes.
WhatsApp did restore its services sometime around 12:40AM (India time), but it reportedly stopped working again. According to reports, this happened due to some server issue that the app suffered worldwide. It was post 1AM (India time) that the services were completely restored, and WhatsApp is working perfectly fine now.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told Digital Trends, "WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Meanwhile, WABetaInfo -- a Twitter handle that is quite accurate with information regarding WhatsApp had this say -- "WhatsApp is currently working now, and the team confirmed the server issue has been fixed. Note that it is possible that some outages may happen again in the next few hours, also if the worst is over." Although, there's no official statement if WhatsApp may experience service outage again or not.
The scenario has become very common these days. This is not the first time that we have heard about WhatsApp server issues. In the last 5 months, reports of WhatsApp crashing have come up quite often, around 3 to 4 times to be specific. A reason behind the outage could be the death of SMS. Earlier, SMS shared the load of new year greetings with messaging services like WhatsApp.