WhatsApp, the popular messaging platform went down earlier today and almost sent over two billion users across the globe into confusion as they could not reach their contacts.
The outage which lasted a little over two hours saw over 66,000 users make reports on the app downtime detector website – Downdetector.
The website reported that WhatsApp users started launching reports a few minutes before 8:00 AM on Tuesday and that by 8:30 AM, over 12,000 users had dropped downtime reports.
More checks on the website further revealed that the first reports started coming in at about 7:42 AM and continued till about 9:57 AM. Within this period, 66,241 reports had been made with the peak at about 8:42 AM.
On the issues reported, 56 percent of users reported an issue with sending messages on the app, 39 percent reported an issue with server connection and five percent launched a general report with the app.
The variation on the report comes amid the confusion by users on the main issue that prompted the shutdown.
Comments on Twitter revealed some users were completely unaware of the main cause of the downtime as most tried restarting their phones while some others thought they had issues with their Internet connections.
While commenting on the issue, a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the outage and also mentioned that the company was working to “restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”
With about two billion users worldwide, WhatsApp has failed to create a dedicated official avenue to update users on its outages.
Checks on its Twitter handle show that the last documented update on an outage was in 2014 which is incidentally, the last post made by the messaging platform on its Twitter handle.