WhatsApp down: Messaging app stops working for users across world

Brief, global outage

WhatsApp has gone down, leaving its millions of users without the ability to send or receive messages.

The problems at the app were quickly fixed – but, with more than two billion people on the service, even the briefest of outages can hit a huge number of people.

Tracking website Down Detector showed what appeared to be a global outage on Tuesday evening, as the messaging app appeared to have broken. Problems were particularly focused in Europe and Brazil, but that is likely to be a result of where active users are most likely to be based.

During the problems, conversations did appear to load, but new messages would refuse to send within those chats.

Some previous WhatsApp outages have been followed by problems at Facebook and Instagram, presumably because they share infrastructure. But those services appeared to continue working as normal.

Unlike those other Facebook-owned apps, WhatsApp does not operate a status page to update users and developers on any problems with its service, meaning there is no easy way to know whether the company is aware of the outage of how widespread it might be.

The company does have a devoted Twitter account – under the name of WhatsApp Status – but it has not been used since 2014.