Within days of its acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp has suffered a major outage. The messaging app became unavailable for 210 minutes, leading to a frenzy of social media updates.
The outage happened between 11 a.m. and 2:30 pm PST and WhatsApp confirmed the issue at 12:16 p.m. According to a tweet from the official account of the messaging app, “Sorry we’re currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”
The problem started occurring when users trying to send messages through WhatsApp, it got stuck in the loading status endlessly. A message on the screen stated that the app was ‘Connecting’ and it remained there until the issue was resolved.
One of the most likely explanation of this unusual outage right after the acquisition is that the news and the headlines about WhatsApp’s $19 billion acquisition has led to a barrage of new users. This, in turn, could have loaded the service’s servers which may not be ready to handle the overload. As a result, the servers ran into problems and the service became unavailable for hours.
At 2:48 pm PST, WhatsApp confirmed that it had finally taken care of the issue. The status update was a little too brief, offering no explanation of exactly how or why the outage occurred. It read, ‘WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime…’
The outage has also lead to a bevy of conspiracy theories floating on the social media, with some claiming that Facebook is plugging into WhatsApp’s servers, laying its hands on the service’s data. While these remain purely speculations, what seems factual is that the brief outage has led a huge number of users to alternate messaging services such as Viber and Telegram.
Courtesy: TechCrunch
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